After This, Therefore, Because of It
by Invariant
Summary: "What happened to her?" she asks, as she leans her elbows on her knees, matching the slack of his posture, "My mom. Is she-?".-The whole, epic story of the how, and when following 4x19 "Letters of Transit". Eighteen chapters of prime mythology, emotion and all around Fringe-goodness. Because we have to have something to get through the summer hiatus.;
1. Epilogue

**Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, I just like playing with them.**

**Spoilers: For everything up to and following 4x19.**

**Author's Note: This is the WHOLE story post-"Letter's of Transit". Throughout the tale, it takes place in three different P.O.V's, Olivia's, Etta's and Peter's. I suppose, depending on your viewpoint, it could be considered cannon, or you know, perhaps not. I never make that distinction. That's not for me to say. I simply leave it to the reader to make that decision. **

**If you've read my previous ficlet "On This Night" then you'll recognize this epilogue. It's a re-post of the story given every chapter following is hinged on the events portrayed here. I'd thought of simply re-updating that original story, but thought the length of this story deserved it's own publishing. **

**Instead of creating a WIP, I decided to write out the whole story and then post it, that way I was sure to give you guys a sure conclusion, and you wouldn't have to wait weeks for the next chapter. Accumulated, it took me about two months to round-out the details and plot of this story, and then of course, type it all out. **

**Honestly, I feel like I'll have to find something else to do at my lunch breaks now. Haha.**

**Please, feel free to skip ahead to the next installment if you recall this epilogue. It was only meant to be a reminder of what's happened so far. **

**Again, Elialys, this is for you, chica! This is the story I think you were waiting for. ((Big hugs, honey!))**

**Like always, reviews are like candy!**

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** (Epilogue)**

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Tonight, they took shelter in an abandoned subway car, a creaking cabin derailed in a vacated station; another common convenience neglected in aftermath of The Purge.

She watches silent, sedated, as the overhead light blinks out a fluorescent rebellion; fighting like they've been, to stay alive and survive.

Manhattan was taken first, when the war came, then every other municipality in whole; cities crumbling under alien authority that snuck in in the night, merciless encroachers who litter the streets with human carnage.

And every hour brings more bodies, so many countless screams, so many countless fallen there's no untouched ground anymore to bury them in.

Before the day is done, more dead will be burned, set-aflame, and the living will hide, run, or swear allegiance to new order, and even in here, under the blood-stained streets, she can smell the smoke of singed flesh, the fumes of a depravity brought by invasion.

And it stings her nostrils, poisons her blood with an angry defeat that wants to rebel in injustice, cry out to resist.

They came with upper hand, the Observers, with the scientific advantage of their technological progress, and they're ruthless, and vicious;hostile in their supremacy and wrought iron fist.

All around them, as it burns, the world reeks of fear, despair and electrocuted ash; melting away every human autonomy.

Every natural privilage is slipping away.

To thrive, is the only right they have anymore, to find a way somehow to heave through the smoke that's corrupted their lungs, constricted their chests with the violence of a desolate misery.

This fight has taken from them more then mere freedom.

They've been raped of what's rightfully theirs, torn apart from a separation that hollows out ache, cheapens it, makes it pale in comparison to the pain of true loss.

There's nothing but black void in the space of what they no longer have.

And sitting here now, she fights for air as empty becomes her, wrings in her hands the soft red toy that's been warn to thin plush. It's no longer Elmo, but a diffuse paralytic, a black hole that's sucked her bone-gnawing heartache to the after-place only numb knows.

Inconsolably, her heart's been broken to a thousand, tiny pieces.

A thousand tiny pieces like their daughter's thousand tiny laughs.

The day she was born, he gave her a nickname, said nothing would ever pierce his heart as much as her big blue eyes, her deep little dimples.

The day she was brought into this world, he called her Bullet.

It's like being shot with a love-gun, he'd said, as he'd held their baby, tiny, soft and two minutes old, you just can't expect how much you can love something until you're hit with the force of it.

At first, she wasn't a fan of the moniker, and he knew it, amused himself by teasing of her selfless inclination on duty, saying she's always putting her life on the end of one, so why hate bullets now? Though this one's a lot cuter then any he's seen before and even she had to admit, so much cuteness had the power to wound men and kill armies.

Even the Ubermenscher and Bigfoot would die at her feet.

It only took her a week after that, to love the name too, and every time she used it, he'd wear a small smile, coo to their daughter that daddy always has a way of winning mommy over.

That's how she came to be in the first place.

And for a while they knew comfort, were spoiled-rotten with happy, and by the time she was three, Etta outreached all her firsts, could read every billboard, and burned out the Lion King soundtrack and the Dora one too.

She'd worn her "Grandpa did it" shirt so much, the writing lasted two weeks, had tucked so many red vines in little pockets she stained them pink, and stuck so many stickers to her toddler bed, they couldn't find the headboard.

And all of it, every sticky, smudgy, giggly little moment, filled their lives in ways they could never imagine.

For three years, she'd had her corner slice of rare perfection, had free-fallen, helplessly, into the reality of a perfect little family in this fucked up pseudo-science world.

Like the princess castle she made out of craft sticks and scotch tape, Etta had crafted together every good thing, every normal thing in the world with her special little hands.

Grandpa always said she was too smart for her age, too quick with her milestones. Too intelligent even, for the hereditary genius of her Bishop DNA.

Special made her wonderful, special made her theirs.

Then it wasted no time in taking take her away.

They'll want the child, September had said in the beginning, as he stood with their resistance to fight-off his kind, it's a matter of time now, before they discover her existence, before they realize her importance to the survival of your race.

They didn't understand, not fully, but experience taught them to heed his warning, not question its reason.

So they let the blackness of night hide their movements, shield them like her power shields their minds; a telepathic block of the intrusion the enemy reads everyone else with, but as war grew so did the danger, and to rely only on her ability anymore to save the life of their child was a fool's mission, a fool's hope.

They knew she needed better then a "just maybe it'll work" defense.

They had to stop believing good enough could ever mean absolute.

They couldn't truly protect her here, in the fight, on the run, they couldn't promise her no harm while they risked their lives in the thick of it.

It's why hard decision brought yesterday's choice.

And as Etta laid between them, her little head on her favorite spot on daddy's chest, his eyes spoke of what they're going to do. Sad and gray, they looked down on her, taking in her chubby little cheeks as he'd brushed blond curls with his fingers, the way he always did when he admired her in sleep, when the set of his smile meant she couldn't be more perfect because she couldn't be more theirs.

But there was no smile last night, instead his face was broken, fragile with an ache that cracked her own heart, that plummeted her chest to the place that wrote every sad note in his features._ We have to,_ he'd said finally, his voice soft, breaking under the pain of their reality, _It's all we can do now, to keep her safe._

And then she held him, the warmth of their daughter between them as he buried his quiet tears in her shoulder, as he dampened her skin with the salt that's dried on her neck. And when she kissed him, she tasted it, the raw sadness, her own misery leaving trails down her cheeks, damp lines he wiped away with his thumbs, his mouth, and they spent every hour till dawn this way, sharing in a torment no parent should know.

Then too quickly, morning came.

And eight hours ago, they gave her a different last name, and they cut her hair. They dressed her in her favorite pink windbreaker, and told her she was going to Aunt Nina's till they come back to get her.

But her big blue eyes were far away, and her face scrunched up in thought, her little brow privately deliberating the same way daddy's always does. And when her four year old understanding caught on, she'd brought her hand to mommy's cheek, brushed the warm skin there as mommy tried like hell to hold back more tears.

Their brave little girl was holding it in, she could see that, as her little face fought not to cave into sadness, give in to the ache of a separation no child should know, and her little stare liquefied, her little lips quivering as her little body started to shake with a shallow breath.

In the way she'd always been, she was perceptive to the truth. And in the way she'd always been, she was strong for those around her because of it.

_I won't cry,_ mommy, she'd said finally, _I know you'll come back soon._

And as mommy's heart broke, her daughter was ripped from her arms, taken under the rouse of a loyalist party, Nina's saving face, her guise to fool the enemy in believing she's one of them.

_I promise, she'll be safe here with me,_ the older woman had said,_ they'll never know who she is. We have ways to make sure of it. Our technology may not be as advanced as theirs, but it will conceal her identity. They'll never suspect the left hand if we fool them long enough with the right. Be careful, Olivia, and good luck._

And then she was pulled back, urged away from the basement steps of Massive Dynamic by familiar hands, and as Peter guided her to another disposable car they'll trade for footfalls, she felt this nothingness invade her body, this complete void of anything real that left her crumbling inside from the pain of her heartache.

As this night falls, she's only fractured, unfix-able.

She's cold, like the floors they've traded for creature comforts, torn like the collar of his jacket on a battle-heavy night, when Etta wouldn't let go, wouldn't give in to Astrid's hands as she'd pulled her to safety in an underground bunker.

More than anything, she feels like she's flickering out, like the light in this cabin, like the liberties of the country.

She's been raped of her strength.

There's no air here to take in, in this decaying makeshift refuge because every substance, every life-giving thing anymore feels irreconcilably empty.

This is what dying inside feels like.

"I told Walter we're safe." Says the quiet, hoarse voice from afar, and it breaks her cogitation, wants to remind her there's a bench underneath her and hard steel beneath her feet.

But she just can't feel anything anymore.

"I said we'd meet back up as soon as daybreak."

As he sits next to her, he pockets the transmitter, yet another untraceable piece of tech they'll discard tomorrow to keep the enemy at bay.

And it grows to quiet again, the broken train, the broken atmosphere, too suffocating to harbor anything but a choke-hold.

So he blows out a long breath, as exhausted and shaken as she, and she feels his agony push into her, his quiet pain echo into every space under her skin.

And suddenly gravity itself, is crushing her bones, threatening to decimate her into dust, into worthlessness, into the same blackness he's fighting with too.

"I've always told myself I can live through anything," she says, breaking the silence, her eyes on the fuzzy toy but her focus on nothing, "I've always believed that I can survive anything," she turns the character over, smooths down the frazzled hairs stuck up from dried juice, "but this-this pain is so close to unbearable, I feel like I'll die from it."

And her breath labors, her whole body outwardly overcome now with the force of her torture, and her lungs hurt, burn under the weight of her threatening tears.

"I feel like my heart's just been ripped from my chest."

She finishes, finally breaking, and suddenly, he's pulled her into the nook of his arm, into the spot that smells, constantly, like strawberry-apple shampoo, and silently, she cries into it, wants to inhale every last trace of the world they gave up.

"Our baby girl, Peter," she says, her cheeks hot from his warmth, wet with her tears, "We gave up our baby girl."

And because she can't breathe anymore in the crevice of his body, her hands fist in his jacket, pull at the fabric that's tight along his shoulders, and she prays, prays that she can just die here, suffocate her pain here, but her veins only burn from the numbness, the emptiness.

He's whispering something, but she doesn't hear, is planting kisses through her hair, on her temples, but she only sees him embracing their daughter with the same soft touch, with the same tender comfort.

And she presses herself so tightly into him, she can smell his skin through the layers of cotton, can smell her sweat in his, and the baby oil scent that fits him so beautifully, he was born to wear fatherhood.

"What if we never see her again?"

One hand is raking through her hair now, as the other caresses her back, and as she clutches on to him, her lips brush his neck, the bare place where a chain once hung above the place of his heart.

_I want to give it to her_, she'd said last night, as she traced the metal links with her finger, as she followed the cool length to the pendant it held._ I want to give it to her so she knows, so she remembers her name, so she remembers us_. And in her palm, the bullet gleamed, the gift she'd given him on his thirty-fourth birthday, so no matter what, their daughter can be with him wherever he goes.

The nickname had been etched in its threads, the same way "forever" is etched into the silver band on her left hand, the only material thing anymore she'll never let go of.

It's more then a ring, it's a seal of belonging, an emblem of her home.

And she wanted Henrietta to have such a totem, to know the same comfort, to know the same kind of promise that beats under her skin.

_But it's daddy's,_ she'd said, in the back of the car, when mommy slipped it on her neck with a kiss,_ won't he miss it? More then you'll know,_ _baby girl_, mommy thought,_ more than you'll know he'll miss you._

_No honey,_ she'd answered, grappling back wet-heat,_ Daddy wants you to hold on to it,_ and for the sake of four year old assurance, she'd tried to smile but her breath shook instead._ You gotta take care of it, okay, sweetheart? It's gonna be yours now for a while. You have to keep it safe until we come back._

Her big eyes glinted then, just like her fathers do, twinkled with a silver-blue sparkle of pride._ I will, mommy, I'll protect it for daddy._ And when she'd toyed with the gold cartridge, turned it over with her fingers where it hung on her chest, that pride turned to something else, something hopeful._ I'll make sure it's safe, and when daddy starts to miss it, then you'll come back to get it,_ she'd said because to her tiny little toddler mind it was fact, it was answer, _then we'll all be together again, and he won't miss it anymore._ And to nod, was all mommy could do to keep from breaking down completely.

Then she'd kissed her little head, took in the fruity scent tangled in tiny blond curls.

And Etta reached beside her then, plucked up the stuffed toy between mommy's lap and her car-seat._ Here mommy,_ her daughter had said, pressing the Elmo into her hands,_ now you and daddy have something to keep safe for me, too. Give him lotsa hugs, okay? He likes those best. And if he gets scared, let him know that I'll give him the biggest hug ever when you and daddy come home._

For however long it takes, their daughter will wait with wide open arms. Not truly for Elmo, but the loving hands of home that will bring him back to her.

"Liv, don't do this, don't think like that," he says now, pulling her from herself, cooing a comfort she can't grasp into the confines of her hair. "We gave her up so she could survive. We hid her so she could survive. And we have to believe that she's gonna be okay. We won't make it out of this if we don't."

He pushes her back now, peels her away from his chest and she's hit with cold air, violated, deprived of the heat he's stolen away from her body.

"We can't lose hope now," he says, his voice a whisper as he cups her face in his palms, "We can't let ourselves fail by falling apart. We have to be strong for her."

And his breath falls on her cheeks, as he presses his forehead to hers, heats her tears again with every exhalation.

"It's what she needs from us now."

He's fighting his own private sorrow, when he lifts her chin, forces her to see him, to take in red-rimmed eyes of gray-slate under the sad set of his forehead, his face creased in the same pain that's robbed her of stable senses.

"And she's gonna grow up and she's gonna be beautiful, and brave," he says, his voice hoarse, seeking strength for her sake, "and she's gonna know that we loved her enough to want more then this world for her."

She thought she couldn't hurt more inside, then she does already, but as he peers into her, the break of his soul demolishes hers, sends it to the same aching place where nothingness lives.

"And I know it's going to kill us inside everyday she's apart from us, and it hurts like hell now to even breathe, but Liv, Etta's going to know that we loved her enough to make this kind of choice."

Through the pain, his gaze softens suddenly, a glimmer of something she can't feel that turns it pale blue, an optimism she recognizes in the crinkle lines at his eye's edge, a hope caught in the crowning lines of his brow. "She's gonna know we loved her, Olivia. As hard as it seems now, as hard as all this feels right now, she's gonna know."

"And if we don't believe that, if we can't trust in that, we won't win this fight. We won't live long enough to see our little girl again. And we have to. We have to be able to tell her again, ourselves, how much we love her. "

These words do nothing to console her, as much as he wants them to, she only still feels hollow, and it makes her fall into him again, clutch onto his body because he's the only thing anymore that feels even real.

"Oh god Peter, I just-"

She can't finish, because her voice is gone, buried into his coat, like their daughter's face used to be when she'd play hide and seek.

"I know, honey," he says, "I wish she could be here with us too." Then she feels his body shake, his words crack. "I want her back with us too."

And when his arms entrap her tighter, she collapses completely, every breath she fights for hefting her chest against his, her body, entirely helpless as all her numb melts into his heat.

And her hands pry away from their clench to find his sides, digesting the realness of his body under her finger-pads, and somehow it's diffusing her sorrow, crying out for a distraction that can make her feel more than heartache, know more then this pain.

So desperately, she grasps at his shirt, untucking the thin threads till she finds skin underneath. And unexpecting, his muscles tense in surprise, then he leans back, searches her face, and his eyes are a dark-gray question under the brave little light, his face shadowed in angles of a carefully soft study.

_Take it away_, she pleads, wordlessly, as she sits up straighter, feels her body coil under her own instigation,_ please, Peter, I want to feel more then this._

_I don't want to feel this._

And when her thumbs find his bottom lip, trace the flesh there, she feels her body hum with new current, an electric pulse in her system that ignites from his skin.

And his lashes fall, in response, a heavy-lidding of instant desire that's darkened gray to steel-blue, slowed his breath with the hard bite of lust cursing into her.

Already his effect is white-washing her heartache, covering it up for a chance to pretend nothing hurts, to make-believe the curve of his cheekbones wasn't shared with a cherubic little other.

But despite his own want, he pushes her back, uncertainty flashing over stubble planes and smooth arcs, he's not assured of her state, worried she's too tired, exhausted, incoherent from her misery, but she won't let him have this, won't let him take away from her another saving grace.

So she leans into him, braces her weight on her knees, raises herself into his lap as she peers down at his face.

_Just take it away,_ she begs, silently, as she digs her hands into his shoulders,_ just make it all go away._

And before he can say her name, before he can ask if she's sure she wants this, here of all places, her mouth crushes his, the flavor of his lips a surge through her boneless-ness, a re-awakening of her blood cells with the sweet taste of honey, salt and shared sacrifice.

And she feels him, deep in her skin, she feels him latch on to this rouse, to this temporary escape, because secretly, just as badly, his heart was begging for her like this too.

This is a different kingdom, the only other wonder of the world that hasn't been lost to them.

And it's crazing her, fueling her, making her claw at his clothes with a desperate need for his bare skin, and she feels him come alive in her hands, respond with fervor when her tongue traces his. Primal and raw, reeling lust buries into her, hitches her breath with hot incitement, and against his mouth, she groans, presses her lower half into his and the sensation's a shock-wave through them both, tensing his back while it shoots to her fingertips.

There's an impulsive, static ache now, in everything under her flesh, an echo of his synchrony that's chemically electric, kinetically hot, and when his hands find her waist, push under her shirt, her whole body jumps from the cool ring on his left hand.

And the thrill feeds her furor, as his aggression turns to fever, and his fingers roam down her ribs, before gripping her hips, and she knows he's moving her, lifting her, but she's only conscious of the fire that's burning her inside and out. And suddenly she's on top of the bench, her back pressing into the ledge of a window while her body pins between his own and the side-rail, caught between his heat and cold steel. With purpose, his lips leave hers to find her jaw, her neck, marking it red from the stubble that sends aftershock to her toes.

Like only he can, he's taking all her self-control as his touch and mouth imprint her, his hands finding the underside of her bra while his jeans friction against the exposed skin of her middle. And he pushes his weight into her, into the spot between her thighs where she nestles his pose, and that rapid-fire ache becomes a searing throb, a pulse that shoots hot stars up and through the whole span of her body.

And the promise of pleasure grinds her hard into the steel pane, guiltlessly knocking away her breath as she struggles to do away with his jacket, his shirt, but his working mouth is restricting her, benumbing her.

Need is teeming her with frustration now, rapaciousness, her skin so hot to meet his that her nerve-ends burn with blinding delirium. So she groans his name, pleads it out with greedy breath as she tugs on his coat, and obliging, he pulls back, lets her have her way as the barrier drops to the ground. Then it's his shirt she lifts off, and her bomber that follows, stripped away with her top by his expertly skilled fingers.

And it attacks her with cold air, her hot skin violated by the breeze introduced, and he captures her shiver, swallows it down with his mouth, his fingers gliding over the swell of her breast. And it's too much for her to take now, this excitement, this white-hot frenzy of everything under her flesh.

It's scalding her lucidity, scorching her to madness, but before she can push into him, before she can envelope herself in anymore of his bare skin, he pulls back, leaves her body aching in the tease of release.

And as she fights for why, his hand brushes the side of her neck, softly, gently, a new spark of tenderness amidst their primal exchange, and it re-directs the air to the soft place in his eyes.

This is his worship of her, his twilight gray admiration bleeding from his innermost core, and the strength stuns her, rail-roads her sideways with the depth of his soul that's breaking through to her own.

Unimaginable, is the force of his love for her.

And when he speaks his voice is almost a whisper, laced with more emotion then should be allowed any words.

"You have no idea how much I love you."

And for a moment she's dying of pain's opposite, as her body sighs, her heart swelling with feelings of its own, her chest tightening with eight million degrees of its own fierce affection.

And suddenly, she feels like crying again, struck through and through by the heart-wrenching power of his gaze, and on her finger, her band reacts, a nine-times heavier weight that radiates into and under her flesh with its promise, a phantom permeation of his vow that fills her with the slow-burn of his love for her.

This is what she has; it's her real, her anchor, her tourniquet.

He is her here, when here seems gone forever. This is where she'll find the strength to press on, to know courage.

Inextricably, in the way they've become, he understands this too, knows it's only together they have a chance to make it, their lives dependent on the taste of the other, the feel.

So both his hands find her face now, as he leans his forehead to hers, his breath as heavy as it is hot.

And sinking into her is a whisper of his sadness, the prime ache they just hid with sexual scourge and it makes her grip his bare sides, pray the emptiness will stay away this time if she holds onto him tight enough.

"We'll get through this."

He says, his voice soft, and she knows he needs to believe it as much as she needs to hear it.

"We'll get through this Liv, I promise."

She's speechless, in response, any words to choked-up now through heartsore's re-emerging, but she's a solider in his hands, a fighter, so she battles it back with determinate will, trying like hell not to let it sting so goddamn deep anymore.

So she does the only thing she can, re-initiates the only salvation they'll truly have, and she kisses him, soft this time, and delicate until he deepens it with his tongue, until he's pressing her into the train again with the length of his half-naked body.

And it elicits a moan from her, a conceding sigh that has her pushing into his heat, into his skin, and again, her nerve-ends have a mind of their own, firing erratically downward, insanely haywire, unhinging any feeling besides reeling desire.

It's making her dizzy again, this bedlam, this madhouse of her senses that uproar from his taste, and she wants more of it, needs all of him now to finally satiate this hunger, this ache that pulses so deep it takes every part of her. So her fingers work at his belt, while his slip down from her bare waist, and she catches the thrill of it in the back of her throat, feels it against his mouth when his touch finds her hipbones, over-sensitizing the space in-between them till hot spikes could burn through her flesh.

And the sensation rocks her so intensely she has to bury her face into his neck, carnal urge careening through her like fast lightening in a heat-storm.

Patience anymore, is a lost cause, a forgotten past-time, and she just wants to strip them both of every fabric still impeding their raw devour, their bare closeness.

And because she'll say his name, beg him again to just have her, to just take her before she burns alive, he'll give her what she wants.

They'll levitate their bodies sore, gratification spiraled into otherworldly release, a fireworks through hot skin and veins that reminds her, every time they're humming and spent, grasping for air in the clutch of each other, how perfect they marry together in every sense of the word.

There'll be a church there, under invisible sheets, a wonder-wall of the only religion she needs put her trust in.

And that definition will be enough for now, to hold them, to grant them the bravery they need to be strong for their daughter.

_I do know,_ she'll tell him a time later, when she's hugged into his body, when they'll wait out another night in a different cold safe-house,_ I know how much you love me._ And she'll peer into his eyes, and they'll be deep with an inviting gray, a fall into serenity from only his air. _You gave me our daughter,_ she'll whisper, before she'll kiss his chest in the place a little head once rested. And she'll wrestle back wet-salt, as her palm will press to the place of his heart. _You gave me a family. No love could be stronger than that._

Scarce as they'll become, reserved only in moments with her, he'll smile, a slow drag and curve of a beauty that will catch in her lungs._ I'd say that makes us damn near invincible then, wouldn't you?_

Her mouth will move in kind, in response, a tiny curl of her lips that's no longer a stranger, and with the familiarity will come new faith, a jump of her heart-muscle that reminds her why all the hope it can muster hangs on his confidence, his optimism, the spell-binding blue ore that'll fleck through his soft lashes.

Then she'll kiss him, validating his words with the strength of her embrace, with a hand through his hair, before he'll brush a strand from her face.

_We're gonna make it Liv, we'll be okay. We're gonna be a family again_.

Then he'll press his hand to her abdomen, his thumb a circular caress atop her shirt, his wedding ring a hot pulse melting straight through it.

_All four of us._

And even bigger, she'll smile, wrap her arms around him, kiss his neck and his jaw and his cheek in the same way he did Etta, the same way he'll do again in eight months, when he's holding the baby they made the night they comforted each other in a train-car.

Another miracle's been given them, another life of their love that makes no sense of space and time.

But like their beautiful little girl, it's perfect; too wonderful anyway.

So they'll continue to hope, fight to believe the world can get better, that it will, that they'll find again the freedom of happiness in a reality where their children can be safe and together and dare to know joy.

They'll press on in believing that one day they'll be whole again, complete in a love that only takes fulfillment for answer.

To win this, all this, they'll hold to each other, resolute in fighting to get their Bullet back, their lives reclaimed, their everything mended.

Together, they'll never shatter like worlds can.

Infinity itself, will fall before they do.


	2. Part I

**(Part I) -2036-**

**_{Peter's P.O.V}_**

* * *

Twenty one years later he tells his daughter this story, in the back of a different, dimly lit train while she's seated beside him, a bench away from her grandfather, her fingers, playing with the pendent she holds in the same place he once did.

"What happened to her?" she asks, as she leans her elbows on her knees, matching the slack of his posture, "My mom. Is she-?"

She doesn't say the word, but the life of it lingers, a thick suffocation in the air of silent cononation, a death-grip of suggestion that sucks the light side of this reunion to some distant place.

Inside the congestion, she patiently, carefully waits, her eyes big under the white-yellow fluorescence, a curious, argent blue delicately lined with the sadness of possibility, a hurt of the same green that to him, he saw a day ago, in another beautiful gaze, in another tragic time.

All he can do is curve his mouth, a small break of the somber pose he feels on his face, the pain of memory too great an ache, that if he didn't crack through it, it'd entomb him completely.

More so than it has been the past twenty minutes.

He'd taken in Etta's cheekbones, her whisper-gold hair, the curve of her chin that he'd lined, years ago, with tiny, damp raspberries as fits of giggles betrayed her resistance.

In front of him, begging that he know her, was the angelic little girl he'd given up. Twenty four, and grown, she was just as beautiful as he'd known she would be.

And at first, it'd stunned him, his body, frozen in realization, in miraculous unbelief, then shaking with joy as he hugged her to him, smelling still, somehow, of strawberries and baby powder, the nasal-factory memory he'd committed forever to his bank of grand moments.

Then his heart choked, in constricted torment, as he'd called her his baby, hearing, in the back of his mind, her mother's same words when she'd rock her to sleep, mark her face with wet kisses.

This torture he feels, this difficult grasp of reality, is the impact of two life loves, a pain that pulls under his skin.

Both ends of his emotional spectrum tying knots in his chest, ping-ponging sound resolve, breaking his lungs, till he thinks they could shatter.

And as she stares at him, waiting, the lines of her brow crinkle, raise, the same crease of question he tries not to picture on another woman he held close.

Because he can't talk, not yet, he reaches out, smooths the line with his thumb, imagining for a moment, that he's comforting again, his four year old's sadness, his little girl's nightmare.

Always, she'll be his baby girl. His little Bullet.

And as she leans into his palm, absorbing the soft touch, he almost feels like breaking, but fights it instead, knows he has to be strong because this is his stolen-away universe, his re-discovered lost world.

"I don't know, sweetheart." he finally says, as his thumb moves to the soft skin of her cheek, and he swallows, his throat already dry from recollection, "I just...lost her. I lost them both."

His breath labors, as again, he chastises himself, another plummet of his guilt that drops his chest, hollows it out.

"And I'll never forgive myself for letting it happen."


	3. Part II

**(Part II) -2016- **

**{Olivia}**

* * *

It hasn't stopped raining since _They_ came, a weep of the skies that smolders the fire on the streets, washes the blood from gray pavement, trickles down the ruins of buildings collapsed-in from brute force.

And as she stands here, the rain beats down her back, is soaking her clothes, chilling her to the bone with the acid of change, the poison of war's imprint; a desolation that pulse's through to her core.

For all the innocent below them, this is how the angel's cry.

As if they know somehow of her torment, drops fall to the arcs of her cheeks, run down her neck, flow to the ends of her hair before hitting her boot, sopping in through the leather.

Like everything else now, she may as well be drowning alive.

Behind her, they converse under dry cover, her team, tracing blue-prints and constructing plans under the shelter of a breaking hanger, a warehouse once housing military imports, now only holding their last leg of defense.

It's their last chance for a life at before.

_We're going to create a device that disbands the enemy,_ had been Walter's words,_ disarms their technology, an electro magnetic pulse that rips apart the fabric of space time, to disseminate, momentarily, the linear equation that allows them travel._

_It's a way to confuse the variables,_ this Bell had chimed in, thirty minutes ago, over the broken parts of the Beacon they'd stolen, mechanics he and Walter interpreted with new knowledge of Observer tech, _we'll set off an electric charge that could scramble mathematical solution back to simple probability._

_In theory,_ Peter had said to her, to clarify, _it would be like a rewind button, a reset of everything up to The Purge. They can't bring war if they can't find where they're going._

_Yes, exactly,_ his father verified, raising an oil stained finger in the air,_ by re-creating a set of vibrations like those that were encapsulated in the Beacon, we can create a different wave-length, based on a new functioning set of variables, a new pulse inside our own device with the sole purpose to misdirect. To conceal the pathways that allow them to travel through time in the way they're accustom._

In short, they're going to use their own technology against them.

They're going to disable their time travel.

They're going to hide the world from them.

_Your only predicament now, is finding a way to before without being discovered_, Bell had said, as he stood next to his old partner, glasses perched low on the bridge of his nose,_ if you're going to use the device, you'll have to find a way to the beginning, a way back to the past so the beacon ignites at the very moment of invasion. And I fear, there's only one resolution. One answer that solves this dilemma._

And the answer is her.

_Though in recent years it's leveled out, there's still a significant amount of cortexiphan infused in your system, it's what provides you with the ability to block their telepathic transmissions,_ he'd said, _so I believe it's possible that if you can concentrate that signature long enough on one specific and individual locus-_

_We could sneak back unaware,_ Walter had cut in, the wheels turning in his own, brilliant mind._ We could use their technology to travel like them, but without the risk of being found out._

_You my dear, have the power to shield our brain-waves, the electro-neurological impulses they have mind to translate. Because of this, you can hide any appearance of the intrusion we'll set out to make. The ability is rather like a buffer, acting as a protective barrier to whatever it serves._

A barrier that crosses time, however_,_ he'd said, is a much bigger stretch then what she's done in the past.

It would require an expanse of her energy on a much grander scale, a re-amplification of the substance that's no longer dormant in her system. They'll have to re-introduce it to the parts of her brain that flushed it out, and they'll need a conduit large enough to evenly distribute the force of such power.

So they're going to use the machine, the wave-sync, they're going to re-format the monstrosity that, long ago, created a bridge to destruct another.

_Given Peter's relationship to the machine, I suspect the child your carrying will allow you the particular connection to its subset interface,_ Bell told her, after exclaiming he knew it's mechanics, he knew how to re-engineer it for this cause,_ with your ability, the machine will act as a conduit, harboring the energy you'll expel while directing it toward a singular target, the wave-length we'll use to travel back to the past._

_Hiding under the cover you'll grant us, we should be able to set off the device in that time, the time before the Observer's initial attack, and in result, shut them out of the door they accessed our world with._

It's a brilliant plan devised by two brilliant minds.

But not everyone in the room had been so easily swayed.

Because the bullet she'd strung on a chain, that she'd given Peter for his birthday, had been hers once, a dented cartridge shot through forced hand, Walter's trigger-pulling only choice to stop an insane man from using her unbridled power to create his Utopia.

To put an end to the God-like plans of a man with Bell's face; she'd died once.

In a different time, Peter never wanted to see again the bullet he attributed to William Bell's madness, the one he had to watch be pried from her cranium so a childhood drug could heal her wound over; not until she gave it new meaning when she hung it on his neck.

_If it wasn't for this, we wouldn't have this life,_ she'd said to him, _we wouldn't be here and we wouldn't have our daughter. Not only will you carry her name with you, you'll carry a part of me. It'll remind you everyday just how lucky we are to have come this far. You'll carry both of us when you wear this._

In a different time, they almost didn't make it.

In a different time, a man named William Bell had been the enemy.

_I don't trust him,_ Peter said to her, three days after this Bell appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, to claim he was the true version of the man they despised. _I don't care if he's won Walter's trust, he doesn't have mine. I can't forget that a different iteration of this man wanted you dead four years ago. If Bell's alternate had the mind to use you to fulfill his narcissistic vision, who's to say that this one doesn't have the same kind of plan up his sleeve. I'm not losing you again to this man's ego._

She'd tried not to feel the same weariness then, the same suspicion that carved the worry line in his forehead, the doubt in his eyes.

They'd had to many close calls up to then, too many almost-lost battles they'd escaped from by the skin of their teeth, and if not for this Bell, this man who claimed imprisonment for months, who claimed his mind was penetrated by the evolved hand of technology, raped over through wires and machines by a madman with his face, then they wouldn't have had the breath to discuss his intention.

In recompense of his other, Bell came to help them, claiming insight of the Observers, of their tech, of exploring and realizing their plans before he'd been kidnapped, without warning, by his alter-ego. Distraction provided him a leeway of escape then, and he'd used the same method to save them now, twice, from the waiting guns of Loyalists.

If he truly was playing them, if he was being dishonest, he'd done nothing to show it, offering only the side of himself that, years ago, gave her the clues she needed to win a very different war, with a different type of enemy.

Malicious motive wasn't a likeness this Bell shared with his doppleganger.

For the sake of their survival, she couldn't second-guess the innocence Walter saw in his old friend, a man who's proven himself in less then a week to the good doctor's skeptical, weapon-ready frown. Through offered wisdom and convincing explanation, her father-in-law thoroughly came to believe in the case his old partner stated.

To the point of vulnerability, the war was leaving her desperate, too, urging her to grasp on tight to anything that appealed to her instincts, that convinced her to follow any whim sounding logical enough, believable enough.

Truth is, this Bell with all his overwhelming presence, his scientific induction, and knowledge of the Wave-sync, was the only chance they had left to put up a fair fight.

September had already been taken from them, the rest of the resistance, too.

Regardless of whether he could be truly trusted or not, Bell was their only way out of the putris slowly swallowing them alive.

They had no choice but to follow him.

_As of right now, we don't have a reason not to trust him_, she'd told Peter, as he'd looked down on her uneasy,_ everything he's told us up to this point makes perfect sense, from what happened to him, to how his alternate could have known so much. Besides,_ she'd said, feeling something like pity come over her,_ I know what it's like to have your life lived by someone who's supposed to be you. I know what it's like to try and make up for all the things you never did._

He'd bowed his head at this, ashamed almost, for not considering the same-hand she'd been dealt, years ago, when another her wore her life.

_Peter, you have reason to be suspicious, and I don't blame you, but I have to believe he's truly here to help us. I have to believe we can trust him. If we don't, we may never win this._

He'd hesitated, but he'd obliged her, wearily working with Bell and his father until two geniusly collective minds introduced a third to their theory.

That they can re-illustrate the war to a blank-empty slate.

If this works, they'll be the only ones anymore, to ever remember it'd been here to begin with.

It's the most brilliant plan they've demised, statistically incomparable to any they've come up with before this.

This is their last and greatest hope.

And as the rain weighs down her jacket, melts into her skin through wet threads, she evens her breath, steadies her nerves, is trying like hell to not be outdone from the weight that pulls down at her shoulders.

_The success of this mission, my dear,_ Bell had told her, mere minutes ago, _is contingent upon your part in it._

She thinks now, as her hand finds her abdomen, that there's something to be said for the hand played by fate. If she wasn't carrying this child, his child, she wouldn't be able to manipulate the machine, to use it to do this.

If she never fell in love with him, she'd never have the ability to save them all now.

"What about the risk to Olivia?" she hears, a familar voice carried in the rain to her ears, and it makes her hold her breath, close her eyes as she imagines the look in his; grey, worried and dark, more afraid then she is for herself.

"What's going to happen to her if this doesn't work?"

"I suspect she'll come away unharmed, protected inside the machine's internal defenses." She hears Bell's cadence, defensive, practical, echoing through the halls of the stark-bare warehouse."Though unfortunately, in this case, and for this purpose, the outcome isn't a certain one. But the very definition of risk, however, requires the possibility of sacrifice."

"Not this sacrifice, it doesn't."

"I understand why you're concerned Peter, but has it occurred to you-"

"Don't start." she hears him interrupt, his voice louder now, more direct. "Your metaphorical philosophical bullshit isn't going to work on me. This isn't some nameless volunteer in one of your experiments, Bell, this is my wife."

Over the tension, she swallows bile, bites back the nausea that's crept from the pit of her stomach to line her throat with acid, and it has nothing to do with her changing hormones, pregnancy's ill-favored side-effect, but the rampant frustration that's crawling up her spine, warming her wrists.

It's this situation's preponderance that's making her sick.

"As true as that may be, young man, the fact remains, Olivia is the only-"

"I don't care what she is! I'm not putting her into that machine without the promise of-"

"That's enough!" she says, shouts into the stormy nothingness she's facing before she turns to them. "Both of you, just-just stop it!"

Suddenly three sets of attention are on her, frowns of surprise, one of shame, and it only goads on her need to be heard, to not be regarded by all of them anymore as a decision-less subject.

And as she approaches, she steps over the threshold, broken concrete that's been ripped of an overhead door from war's pillage.

"It's my choice." she says, standing before them, feeling her blood burn with the kind of conviction that races her pulse. "I'm the one who's deciding if the risk is worth it or not. I'm the one who has to get into that machine," she looks at Bell, "not you," then Peter, "and not you. So enough already!"

Around them all, her voice echoes, hangs in the air with a thick finger of authority, and Walter stands straighter, Peter tenses, and when he leans his arms on the barren room's only table, she doesn't look at him; doesn't want to deal with the fear in his eyes, the apprehension of the words he knows she'll say next.

"I'm going to do it." she states, "I have to."

She feels him swear under his breath, and because she can't handle anymore the weight of his concern, the air of his fear that pricks under her skin, she turns from them all, wanting desperately, to be outside again where there's space for her to breathe.

And he's behind her, when she gets there, his gravity pushing into her back so hard, she clenches her teeth.

She doesn't want him to object, doesn't want his good intentions to argue her choice.

This is her responsibility, her burden, and as much as she wants to, she knows she can't spare him from wearing it too.

That wasn't the deal when they both said "I do".

And right now, all this just angers her, beats hot under her collar, burns her insides with life's injustice; and the stomach acid is threatening to make her dizzyingly sick even more.

Stupidly, vainly, they'd both wanted an answer less dangerous then this.

Wanting though, never manipulates reality with the same ease as brutality.

The fucking machine is always the conclusion they come to, the noose that's hung around their necks since they unburied it, years ago, and it chokes them both with the reality of all they could lose if they use it.

It was truly made to bait them, mock them mercilessly like an intimate friend; a dark lover, reigning over them with the shadow of personal risk.

And if he would leave her be, if he would turn away with his sad story, then she wouldn't have to think twice right now about what's really at stake.

She's dragging him down with the threat of this, could rob him of everything he lives for because of her selflessness, the driving need of her hero complex, and she hates herself because, dammit, saving the world isn't a choice that has two answers.

And one look into his eyes, and she fears her certitude could crash at her feet; could remind her of the indispensable price all this could ask for.

So if she could just be mad enough, if temper could make her incoherent enough, then it could disorient her consciousness to the point of fuddling reality into fickle narrow-sightedness.

If she's pissed off enough, she just won't have to think straight.

Deciphering any feeling right now besides anger, besides the to-and-fro of her hot-wired nerves, is inherently impossible.

There's too many combating emotions under her skin, as she tracks through the wet lot, too much push and pull of her frustration, her fear, and fearlessness that it's only maddening her ire.

This martyrdom she faces is so goddamn sadistic, for so many reasons, that she wants to beat her fists into something, scream into her hands because it's easier then admitting that again, she's a puppet, someone else's marionette being used to serve a purpose not hers, an outcome not certain.

After all these years, she's being used again. It's what she was designed for after all.

But she has to do this, she has to do this for Etta, and for him, and the dying off civility that deserves again to be a free people, to be a free world.

This is her Rubik's cube, an obstacle only her biological imprint was meant for and dammit, if he would just fucking go away, forget about the invisible side of their affinity, than she could pretend all the scrambled faces have the chance of lining up without fail.

She just wants to conquer this hardship too without the whole damn structure falling apart.

"Olivia, think about this!"

She hears, loud words through the rain's clash, and dammit, it just angers her more, starts squeezing her chest with the actuality that this isn't like six years ago.

When their places were switched, she wasn't wearing this ring.

There wasn't the demand for more then one victim when he'd stepped into the Machine, scarred his hands from the choice to save two dying worlds.

And her quiet rage now, has her calling the kettle black, turning what concern he has into hypocrisy, because it's the only reaction her narrow-sightedness can offer. He's no right to berate her for this kind of decision, not after he'd done exactly the same thing when he was given the option.

God, she just doesn't want to do this now with him; watch the pain of her decision play across the planes of his face.

And when her voice carries, it's harsh, biting, because the clangor in her head is nailing her with life's cruelty, its sick and twisted sense of humor that laughs in her face while it stomps out everything she'd had that was left to hold on to.

If she doesn't yell, if she doesn't feed her infuriation, she fears she'll break down and cry from the brute force of affliction.

"I am thinking about it Peter! I'm thinking about our daughter, and I'm thinking about our future, and I'm thinking about all those innocent people who won't have a chance if I don't take this one. You of all people should-"

"Should what?" he questions, the rain trickling down his skin, plastering his hair to his temples as his eyes grow pained. "Should know what it's like to make this kind of choice? I do know Olivia, trust me, I remember, and the consequences then-"

"Well, whatever they'll be now, whatever they result in, it has to be better than this."

She prays it's enough to dissuade him, but she watches him swallow, watches his jaw set as the gray of the sky is sucked into his stare.

"And what if it isn't?"

"Then we'll find out soon enough won't we?"

His teeth clench, as he looks away, fists his hands till his knuckles are ghost-white, and when his nostrils flare, she knows he's tempering the same irritation that's coursing through her, too.

He knows why she's angry, understands in only the way that he can why she's not allowing herself a more rational deliberation right now, and dammit, that he wears her so well is only maddening her more.

"Olivia-"

He starts, but she throws a hand in the air, feels her flesh sting, but not from the rain.

"Don't, Peter," she warns, "when you were faced with this kind of decision, I never once asked you to change your mind. I never once asked that you reconsider, because I knew-I knew what had to happen, I knew what we had to do, what the costs would be if we didn't-"

"The costs are different now. For different reasons."

When he looks back to her, it's not the skies that have dampened his stare, not aggravation that's written the aching lines in his forehead.

And because she's too damn stubborn to give in, she digs her toe into wet gravel, steeling herself from his influence.

"Are they?" she retorts, trying like hell to hold on to her phantasm. "How were the lives of the billions of people then, any better then they are now?"

More then the rain, it's a pain that starts to seep into her, fusing the weight of repercussion into her non-sensical barrier, tingling her back as his pain veins into her fingertips, sears under her skin.

This isn't what she wants right now, is the exact thing she'd tried to avoid with self-delusion.

"I'm not talking about everyone else," he says, his voice decibels softer. "I'm talking about us."

This is the truth that's too goddamn unbearable for her reality to handle.

"We have a family now." he tells her, inching closer, his brow a set frown; a reaction to the implausibility she's pressed on him. "Jesus, Liv, you're carrying our child. Would you think about that, please?"

She's holding back weakness, willing away her tears, determined to stay convicted in her driving ambition because it's the only thing now keeping her from falling to her knees.

"I am, Peter. And I know if I don't do this, this baby isn't going to get any chance at a future."

"And it might not have any at all if you do."

This is tearing him up inside, ripping his heart out and she feels it beating, wildly, through the loud notes of the rain, feels his despair melding into her, transversing into her veins until it chokes the very breath from her.

So she swallows, feels her molars ache as she rebels against the force of his heartache.

If she doesn't fight it off, she'll crumble from the intensity of it.

"I know the risk I'm taking." she says, after she's composed herself. "I know what I'm doing. And you, especially you, should understand why I have to. Please don't ask me not to do this."

For suffocating seconds he stands unmoving, his dark stare intense, incredulous, holding hers so fiercely, it crushes her bones.

Then with his lips pressed, he gives up the fight, his eyes drifting behind her, around her, because his nerves are too unstable, quarreling too anxiously under his skin but on the outside, he tenses, hardens under his surrender, and when a breath escapes his lips it's a humorless chuckle, bitter, a skeleton of irony that knits the line between his brow.

"You know what, you're right." he says, "I guess it's only fair now, isn't it?" And as the rain begins to finally chill her, he shifts his feet, his focus catching beyond the wet pavement, a slate-gray sadness anchored in his secret place. And it lines red, remains unblinking as his chest heaves, a buoy to his constraint. "Shame on me for being so selfish, for trying to hold on to everything I have left." he finally says, his words hoarse, barely audible over the wetness that's drowning them both. "This war's already taken my daughter from me, so what's the rest of my family too?"'

His next reaction is instantaneous, a swift discompose of his posture that his him turning, unable anymore to hold sturdy in his personal anguish to even look back at her.

And suddenly she regrets her ire, the verbal backhand she treated him with simply because she didn't want to consciously register the possibilities, the ramifications of her own choice. It's a whiplash he didn't deserve but she fed it to him anyway. And under her breath, she swears, ashamed, disgusted, angry with herself for hurting him so brashly.

Of all people, god knows he deserved better from her.

"Peter..."

She calls out, unsure what to say, but it doesn't matter, because as he steps around he throws a hand in the air, and it's anger now that colors his features, straightens his back, that's washed over the sadness he feels because if he gives himself over, he'll crumble just like she.

And it barrels into her, his rampant emotion, whips the air from her lungs with the punch of his torment.

There comes a point where all that's left of agony is the harsh sting of anger.

"You made your point, Liv, I get it." he shouts, the rain dripping down his collar, soaking through his shirt. "I just never thought I'd have to be here again, at the point where everything I love could be ripped out from underneath me and there's nothing more I can do to stop it from happening."

His breath labors, as he sucks in oxygen with a heavy chest, is staring at her with eyes so vulnerable, so amazingly pale-gray that the angles of his face shadow under his anguish. So badly she wants to reach out and smooth away the sad lines, but it's a right she lost when she decided to take all this out on him.

"At least we know some consequences can't be that different after all."

It's the last thing he says, the last tear of both their hearts before he leaves her alone in the biting cold of the rain.


	4. Part III

**(Part III) -2016-**

**{Olivia}**

* * *

At some point in the last two days, the clock in the hanger stopped working, flickered out its last liquid crystal chime at three o' three in the morning.

Ironically, tauntingly, it's the same time as the crisis hour, the moment all this started, on a quiet, unsuspecting morning when she'd been tucked in the cradle of his body with their daughter sprawled at her side; in the spot their toddler clambered into after midnight because Rufus, the stuffed dog Astrid gave her, preferred their bed to the lumpiness of hers.

In the way it does, fate's haunting her again, with the broken electronic, the frozen digits a memory of better time, life before chaos became order, commodities became rationed, and the blood of everything she loved wasn't trickling into the ground.

Just like the clock, she feels bare, empty, her attack on him seemingly unfixable now, hours after she'd been left in the atmosphere of her harsh words.

And as she stares at the red numbers, she sits air-dried, silent, absently picking at a candy bar's wrapper, the one he'd shoved into her hands a day ago, after they'd named this abandoned bunker as refuge. There's a double printed "I" in it's brand name, she notes, a factory mistake from a mass-produced line-up.

It must have been what he'd meant when he'd said it was special.

_Here,_ he'd said, _I know you're gonna say you're not hungry, but you gotta feed the super trooper. I even saved you the special one,_ and he'd pressed it into her palm with a smile before he took a bite out of his.

In his eyes, there isn't a priority that comes before her, even in this fight, there's nothing more important then that she care for herself, for their baby. He's always sure she eats, sure she rests, always wraps his arms around her waist, buries his head in her back in the moments when her chest labors from memory, when the yearning to have back their happy days hits her so hard she can't breathe.

It seems like a different lifetime, when they laughed under the covers.

Thinking about it now, compounds her remorse, shame sinking into her with such weight, that her whole body feels impossibly heavy.

Thanks to her, they're trapped now, in the breakdown of what they're not supposed to be. She'd stabbed at their sanctuary, injured it with the jagged end of unwarranted hostility.

A shadow's settled in the beautiful place two worlds collide.

And it's too damn dim here, too lonely and just to mock her, the darkness of the room only accentuates her regret, the only light source the tiny flood lamp that stands against the farthest wall; it's beam unable to illuminate more then the corner.

A red and black solider, it's trying to fill shoes too big for its feet.

Too intimately, she knows what it's like, to feel small, bantam, to inadequate to fulfill the task fate requires.

Beast of a burden it is, to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders.

_Why is he doing it?_ her daughter asked, months ago, as her little eyes skimmed over the children's book of mythology, the picture of Atlas balancing the globe on his back,_ why is he holding the world up, mommy? Because he has to, baby,_ she'd said, and Etta's eyes frowned in thought, a bright blue deliberation as she'd grasped the concept._ It's his job?_ She'd asked then, more a statement then a question, then her eyes turned on her mother, excited now, and full of awe._ It's his job to make sure the world stays up, just like yours and daddy's is! He has to save it like grandpa says you do!_

Atlas was cursed for eternity, imprecated forever with herculean duty, and staring at the little light with her aching heart, she thinks that maybe so was she, and so was he. They've never truly been able to escape from their curse.

They could only ever hide from it; evade it, tip-toe around it.

_ If it comes down to this,_ he'd said, years ago, as they'd stood at his kitchen island, skimming blueprints, descriptions of him in a machine they knew hardly anything about,_ if for some reason, we can't find another way, a different answer, promise me you'll make sure Walter puts the lid on the blender before he uses it_. And when he'd looked at her, his small smile couldn't mask the true fear in his eyes, the subtle strain of his private dread, his un-uttered trepidation in the implication of his sketched-out fate.

_That's not funny,_ she'd told him, irritated, angry almost with what he'd insinuated, and when he'd let out a curt, breathy laugh, it was a contrasting interruption in the heavy air. _I'm not losing you to that thing,_ she'd stated,_ I don't care what these drawings imply, I'm not letting you go. I can't believe this future's inevitable._

It was a genuine grin then, that stretched across his face, a lambent curve that lit his eyes to bright-blue._ Look at that, my optimism's finally rubbed off on you._

_I'm serious Peter,_ she'd said, only growing annoyed,_ I can't believe we can't prevent this somehow, that we can't stop it from happening. I'm not going to accept..._,she'd swallowed then, the force of her next words lead to her lungs,..._ I'm not going to accept that the world can only survive if it takes you from me._ Seconds passed, as he'd registered her words, took in her meaning, then he'd moved across the table, pulled her into him, held her so tightly, she didn't know who's pulse was under her skin._ If you start to appreciate B-rated movies and boot-legged Sake, too, I might have to marry you._

Back then, she trusted in something divine, some kind of omnipresent deity that felt damn near close to sheer will. Simply because she wouldn't accept it, failure wasn't going to be.

And it hadn't been.

They'd cheated a time line and found their way home.

_There was a time, I wouldn't have believed in Walter's crazy philosophies,_ he'd told her, a year ago, as they drove through another town block sometime around midnight, their daughter, lulled to sleep by the car's steady treads inside her Cinderella car-seat,_ but maybe he's right, maybe reality really is subjective and malleable. Look at us,_ he'd continued, as the streetlights played against the windshield, lit his eyes with yellow-gold,_ after everything we've been through, all the places our lives could have ended up, and here we are._ Those gold flecked sapphires flickered over the rear view mirror as he'd peered in it, eyed the precious cargo in the backseat.

_This is the life we wanted, Liv, the life we dreamed about._ And then those lines, those beautiful smile lines at his eye's edge crinkled with the stretch of his cheeks before he looked at her.

_This is the life we imagined, and now we have it. So maybe Walter really has been right all these years, maybe reality is only a matter of perception, maybe it can become what we make it_. Then he'd pulled into their driveway, his grin too sly to not be harboring a quip.

_Except when it comes to Twinkies, no matter how hard we imagine otherwise, the aftertaste will always be there._

Her smile is bittersweet now, as she remembers, as she turns a different snack over in her palms, running her thumb over the chocolate bar's debotched red-letter graphic until the cellophane smooths.

We dreamed a better life, he'd all but said to her once, and so we created one.

If they're going to get through this now, if they're going to survive this obstacle too, together, it's the kind of hope they both need to take stock in. She needs to find for them both, the opulent positivity he viewed the world with before all this; the rose colored glasses tinted by his _everything-works-itself-ou_t optimism.

There's something to believe in standing under that banner.

All these years, he's given her strength and she owes it to him now, to return it in kind.

Again, her hand finds her middle, her fingers spread wide across her abdomen, her palm pressing into the muscle that bears the slightest swell.

In more ways then one, there's something him in everything in her now.

From the inside out, he's the solider-light that illuminates her corner.

Even now, after love's fear and worry have melted his wings, she still feels his radiance permeating her cells, echoing through to her fingertips, surrounding her in this empty room.

They may be Atlas, and Icarus, titans fallen to the demand of their curse, ambitious mortals fallen to the reality of their fate, but destiny is a cruel mistress.

It expects more from them both. It always has.

This makes her suck in a breath, a long draw of an empowerment that reaches through to her bones, tingles in her back the way his words do when he tells her everything will be okay.

_We'll get through this like we always do_, he'll say,_ we'll figure it out, Liv. We're gonna be okay._

Dammit, she owes her daughter this chance, this child this chance, and god knows she owes it to him to do this, to fight for the right for them to hold on, to not give up.

Failure isn't the bargain she's willing to make, it wasn't then, and it won't be now. There won't be risk because dammit, she won't allow it.

Death can go fuck itself. They've defied it too many times already and dammit, they'll do it again.

They're so much more then this ending.

As if it knows somehow of her sudden conviction, above her the broken clock fizzles awake, no longer stoic and motionless, but blinking alive, seemingly impassioned like she's become, convinced almost of a new importance that's restructured it's worth.

For seconds she can only stare at it, the red hum of it's back-light an electro-static charge on the surface of her skin, a pull of hidden energy she feels under her fingertips.

_This has only ever worked with Peter,_ she'd told an Alter-Nina a lifetime ago now, _the cortexiphan, my abilities, all of it, it's only ever worked when I've been around him._

And her quiet laugh now is almost inaudible as she presses her hand tighter to the forming baby bump, her heart such a swell in it's cavity, it stalls her breath with it's constriction.

_This has only ever worked with his child._

Overwhelmed, she blinks back wet heat, her expelled power a dull ache in the back of her skull, forgotten to the foreground of how it happened. And because it's brighter too now, burning into her side gaze with its might, she turns to the floodlight, suddenly a massive luminescence that spans into the warehouse's blackness.

It's an allegory ; a magic metaphor, the symbolic representation of what beats hot now, under her skin.

This light, the one forged by his theology, ignited by her will, pulses through her veins with new promise, with hope, and refuses to flicker out so easily.

Now she needs to make him feel it again too, to wear those lenses that can paint a color portrait world, brush over the gray deterioration of this one.

She won't accept this as their end, and she won't let him either.

Determined, resolute, she steps down from her chair of stacking crates, and her heart beats just a little faster, a little apprehensively, as she makes her way to find him.


	5. Part IIII

**(Part IIII) -2016-**

**{Olivia}**

* * *

His back is turned to her, when she enters the left wing of the warehouse; the outfitted lab they'd constructed in the secret of night, their best imitation of the Harvard basement they'd fled capture from days ago.

Wires and coils are strung on the floor, connecting inventions and devices through conduits of flux; machinery they'd stolen from a subsidary tech-company, a branch of Massive Dynamic, the first mission they'd embarked on to which Bell had granted them access, provided them escape.

It smells of hot dust and electrical fans in this corrider, a stark contrast from the damp concrete and wet air she'd breathed in in the room where she came from.

It's quiet in here too, to late now for anyone besides them to be up, the rest of their team committed to finding rest before sunlight.

They never sleep without the other, so slumber's impossible to even consider now anyway.

Besides the loud beeps of machines, the loud whirl of processors, nothing can be heard but the rain's echo, angry as it patters down the steel roof, chips away at its shingles.

His form is pensive, as he leans over the middle table with silent tension, a thick sadness, a color of the anxiousness she left him in the last time they spoke.

Slowly, she nears him, and under her fingers, the air is thick with his despondence, an atmosphere he'd created that raises the hair on her arms, slithers suddenly under her skin with the true gravity of his fear, his worry.

Ten times more then usual, she feels what's his, absorbs his static, and she blames it on their child when she swallows, knows this already unexplainable connection is heightened by the life growing inside her, the one they created with the chemistry that hums invisible, magnetic, on every plane they share.

Two frequencies tuned to an equal fluctuation; they're two universes operating on the wave-length of one.

They'd melded separate worlds together years ago, made life there, twice. They've already done the impossible, so the unfathomable now, should be a cake-walk, easy, effortless.

They're going to live out their curse. And she's going to make sure of it.

She reaches out, when she's behind him, presses her head into the spot between his shoulders as her arms snake around his waist. She breathes him in, as his breath falters, takes in sweat and aqua-bourbon, baby oil and dried rain, all things Peter that dull out on her skin by the time he evaporates into her. A sigh of recognition, his body laxes from the press of her, uncoils, an involuntary relief of his muscles he can't control when she's touching him like this, comforting him like this.

He's helpless to her feel, melts under her power.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, the quiet apology muffled in his jacket, "I didn't mean-"

"I know."

He interrupts, his voice a vibration that syncs through her, any anger towards her, non-existent, never there, replaced instead, with simple sadness.

"I should know by now, this is what it always comes down to." she hears him say, feels his fingers grip the edge of the table with white-knuckle pressure. "Sacrifice is always the only choice we ever have left."

She doesn't know how to respond, can't muddle through right now, all the assuring phrases running through her head. Coherency is a squabble, a nonplus of lost words she could string together if he wasn't so pained, if the depth of his sorrow wasn't masking over her thought.

"I don't know how much more I can handle, Liv." he says, his voice cracking as he stands unmoving, his hands an anchor, forced strength, a tether to keep the rest of him upright, firm against his torment.

It only makes her hold him tighter, press into him till his warmth suffuses her, becomes her, and she spreads out her fingers on his torso, wills he absorb her strength as she feels lean muscle rise and fall with his shaken inhalations.

"I don't know how much more loss I can take before the hole it leaves kills me itself."

He finishes, and finally he moves, slightly, his posture leaning further down into the desk as his emotion takes hold, to rawly frail in the face of his anguish, but he sucks it back, swears into the air and she feels him raise his eyes to the ceiling, blockading his tears while he blows out a deep breath.

And she closes hers because of it, kisses his shoulder, leaves her lips there as she wills his perturbation to not take her to, to not envelop her with his despair as it bangs on her resolve.

She whispers his name, is trying to think of something to say to ease his calamity, but he speaks again first.

"I'm trying to be okay with this, Olivia, but I don't know if I know how."

For a moment, this makes her hug him closer, bury everything she's made of into every confine of his body, losing herself in him for mere seconds, then she pulls back, rests only her forehead in the crevice of his spine.

This is the way he holds her, when she's suffocating from a different sadness. And she can't physically bear anymore, to feel this in him. It's threatening, too violently, to pull everything she's made of down with him.

If only he'd see things her way now, if only her will can mend his desolation; then those glasses can take this pain away from them both.

"If I don't do this," she says, in a desperate whisper, "if I don't at least try, then we'll have no future to hope in anymore."

"And if you die, it doesn't matter anyway."

This makes her turn her head, groan into him, press her mouth tight because she's not going to let him have this, won't let him fall to his own dejection.

He is Atlas and she is his savior, his liberation lives in her hands, can be instigated through her words, her will, and if he'd just let go of this burden, if he'd just feel the light that brims under her skin, then she wouldn't have to feel his apprehension ripping out of her, too.

"Peter, I'm going to do this."

She tells him again, praying he understand with such ferocity, it makes her clamp down on her lip, clench his jacket in her hands.

"I know." he says, his voice just above hushed. "And I'm not going to ask you to change your mind. I know you won't. It's who you are, it's why I love you."

He relinquishes his anchor now, his hands sliding over her forearms till his fingers squeeze at hers, his body finding poise in her cradle.

"But I just wish the danger in this didn't feel so unavoidable this time," he says, "so certain. I don't know what I'm supposed to do, if this takes you from me. I won't ever stop wondering if there was some other way. Some different answer we haven't thought of yet."

Her breath is slow, aching for him, because he knows as well as she, that this is their best option, there isn't a different answer.

Only this.

"If we want her to make it," she says, "if we want to give our children a real chance, this is the only way. I know you know that."

In response, his body tightens again, an affirmation to her statement, an emission of his trepidation that's constricted even his bones, and he's speechless because of it, his breath sucked back into the black hole of possibility that's running through his head.

It's too damn painful for him to say aloud that she's right. But she can feel it in him, the slow-conception of his submission, hiding behind hesitation, blanketed over by fear.

"Peter, I don't know what's going to happen," she begins, trying desperately, to pull it to the surface, "but I refuse to give up hope, in this plan, in its outcome...in us."

She presses her lips to his neck, in the spot she'd kiss in early hours, after she sauntered up behind him as he sipped a cup of coffee, a deliciousness she'll taste when he captures her mouth in "Good-morning."

"I can't believe this is our end." she tells him, latching on to the memory, "This can't be our fate. We have to have more then this."

Only a little now, she feels him slack, his body wanting so badly to give into her, but difficult is too easy a word for what he's enduring.

"We're meant to have more then this." she finally says, believing, more than anything, in the validity of it. And she just wants the words laced with his perfusion, the way they are when his faith crosses into her, strengthens her. "I need you to feel it." she says, "Peter, I need you to believe it, too."

There's an aching consideration, through his private struggle, a weaker breath that shakes through and into her because he wants to be this for her.

"Please don't leave me alone in this."

She finally pleas and it's the straw that breaks the camels back, her need for him defeating his own confliction, and when he turns around in her arms, he buries her into him, any reticence gone, replaced with only comfort.

"Jesus, Liv-, "he says, "I won't, god, I'm not."

And he hugs her tighter, his cheek pressed into her hair, and when his hand finds her nape, his thumb caresses the skin there.

"But this-this is the hardest thing I've ever had to accept." He buries his head in her collarbone, and when he speaks, it heats her neck. "But I know I have to. I know it's the best shot we've got to win this."

For minutes more, he holds her to him, and her body sighs into his with relief, with assurance. This is what he's giving her, his accordance, his reluctant willingness, and for now, it's enough.

He's too in love to give up all his worry.

And after his lips brush her skin, he pulls away slightly, enough to meet her eyes, and it's a delicate pale-gray that grips her soul, massages it with the deep love rendered in the soft way he's looking into her, breathing into her.

"No matter what happens, I won't ever stop loving you." he tells her, and the aching way in which he says it sends a swell of heat behind her eyes, "You and our children, you're everything to me. You always will be."

As the tears come, he kisses her, with everything he feels, everything he is, he kisses her, and it's the taste of a promise she'll leave with, a promise she refuses to never, ever, leave him alone in either.


	6. Part V

**(Part V) -2036-**

**{Peter}**

* * *

That was the last time he saw her.

He'd woke up alone, the next morning, cold from her missing heat, the empty place against his side she'd tucked herself into that night, after they'd tangled themselves up in each other, their skin damp, a sheen transpired in the tender way they'd moved together, absorbed every bare inch of the other for what would be the last time.

There hadn't been a goodbye, only the note she'd left, ripped from the top half of some paper she'd found on the table, a scrapped spreadsheet of numbers and symbols, computer data discarded in the wake of two postulating scientists.

_I love you_, it'd said, three simple words that bled black ink, slammed into his chest with angry foreboding, a violent gravity that made her absence too real while the air grew too heavy for his lungs.

It was the last thing he'd said to her as he'd kissed the top of her head, the last heart-tightening whisper he'd left in her hair as she'd pressed her lips to his chest.

He never told her goodbye.

She'd snuck out that morning, so he wouldn't have to.

Neither one of them could have handled the words, bore the connotation.

But it's implication, her absence, has become his reality now, twenty years later, as their daughter's passed out next to him, her head, rolled onto his shoulder as the train swerves through another red-lit concrete underpass.

Gently, he rests his cheek on the top of her head, breathes in his little girl, and his fingers roam over the note her mother left, the paper kept mint in his wallet for the decades he was entombed.

There's a pitch in his stomach, a lurch in his chest as he turns it over, ruminatively, taking in every last inch of the last thing she'd touched, the paper-fibers still holding the heat of the words penned on it's front.

It's yesterday to him, when he'd first held this, when she'd last said these words as she'd writhed above him, melted into his core before she pressed herself to his naked body.

_Remember us,_ she'd said, her damp temple pressed to his, her lips a millimeter from his mouth,_ Peter no matter what happens now, remember us like this, remember what it feels like to know how much I love you._

He swallows hard now, holding back the emotion that's shaking his nerves, that's heating his tear-ducts, so he sucks in a long breath, blows it out through clenched teeth.

And because he can't bear to think of her anymore, to consciously feel her under his flesh, he re-routes his concentration to the paper, lets himself wonder of the red-triangular symbol on the note's back page. He runs his thumb-pad over the insignia, and the incoherent string of numbers beneath, asking himself what in the hell data this had been and why Bell or Walter had printed it out.

It's a trivial ponder, but it diverts his attention well enough.

At least until it makes him contemplate, to debate in his mind of the moment when everything else went wrong.

But he can't pinpoint it now.

There's no linchpin he can name that set-off the disaster; It's all a muffle of chaos, one failed move after the next, until it blurs into a hodge-podge of futility.

It had all just happened, too damn fast.


	7. Part VI

**(Part VI) -2016 & 2036-**

**{Peter}**

* * *

All he can remember after she'd gone that morning, after he'd tucked away the note and traced his team back to the danger zone of their old lab is his father, frantic, hurried, obviously anxious over something while Astrid attempted, vainly, to calm him down.

_"He's been like this since we got here." _she'd explained, as he'd made his way to his father._ "He said we had to come back to find something, and the whole time, he's been acting like this."_

_"Walter, what is it?"_ He'd asked, trying his part and then, already, he'd felt his heart beating so hard it could have pounded out of his chest,_ "What's going on?"_

_"They'd been followed,"_ his father had said, as he'd scrambled above the table, mining through gadgets with his free hand, firmly focused on some private task._ "They managed to pin-point their wavelength, and I have the unfortunate knowledge as to how."_

It was a tracer, he'd recognized then, in his father's other hand, a digital remote that tracked specific propagation beacons; the radio signals transmitting on the enemy's private-stream pathway.

They'd decided, months before, they'd never risk using it.

And so it'd been panic that set in then, a quick jump of his insides that fused into his every bone, spryed his body with conscious fear but before he could question the danger, his father forced a small, hockey-puck device in his hand.

_"What is this?" _he'd asked, flipping it over and again until he found the red button, ignited it's hologram.

_"It's a Rune Matrix, Belly's secret side-project." _his father had answered,_ "I found it when I broke into his belongings."_

It'd been years ahead of its time then, the hockey-puck port and it's three dimensional data, more advanced, more complicated then anything his MIT mind had dissected before, and it'd rose questions, ignited his suspicion but he couldn't ask again where it was found before Walter continued.

_"It only proved my theory right,"_ his father had said, his mind firm on his own concentration,_ "that William had an escape plan should his initial scheme prove otiose, futile._

_"I shouldn't have trusted him, Peter!" _he'd shouted,_ "Shame on me for being fooled again by his treachery, his selfish wiles, his vile intent!"_

_"What are you talking about?"_

There'd been so many lost points, he couldn't grasp a sound reaction while his father grew more impatient, running about in the lab, grabbing this, this and that in his wake.

_"Walter, slow down!" _Astrid tried to interject, but he'd breezed right past her.

_"Belly!"_ he'd finally answered, briskly_, "He never meant for her to come out of this. It was never his intent for this to work. Not for the purposes he lead us to believe, anyway."_

_"What? Walter-" _he couldn't finish the thought before his father held up a finger.

_"He'd lied to us, Peter, he'd wanted her in that machine. It was the transceiver in Belly's vehicle that They tracked. He re-installed it, with a filter circuit, I assume, so we wouldn't know. I discovered the signal after making my own altercations to the remote tracker. He turned it on intentionally, Peter. It's how they found them. He'd led them straight to her."_

Already he'd been ready to react, ready to move.

_"If they know where she is-"_

_"My grandchildren, Peter," _his father interrupted_, "your children. That's what this is about."_

_"What?"_ he'd asked, stopped in his tracks from his father's words, from the muffle of his detached understanding.

_"You and Olivia, you're from two separate universes," _he'd begun to explain,_ "you from over there, she from over here." _his hand motions accompanied the words_, "Individually, you resonate at two seperate frequencies, 261.6 megahertz and 392 hertz. Diatonically, C and G._

_"And as I'm sure you can't forget, it was years ago, when a William Bell-," _he'd said the name with new spite_, "-attempted to collapse the two universes by tuning them both to 329.6 cycles per second. An E, in effect."_

And when his father turned from him, still, he'd been at a loss, unable to connect the dots, desperately trying to overturn all the puzzles pieces without the full picture.

_"Walter, I don't understand-"_

_"A new universe, my son," _his father had stated,_ "that's what Belly's providing them, that's why he needed Olivia in the machine, not because of her ability, but because of the fetus growing inside her." _his posture was intense, serious as his words echoed off the basement's walls_. "Your offspring Peter, any heir you and Olivia produce, will be a natural product of two worlds,"_ he'd held up the identifying fingers,_ "two frequencies harmonizing together, a stable wavelength of two, individual oscillations, brought together to vibrate on one organic level, 698.6."_

_"An F?" _he'd questioned, tasting the statement, the jagged ends starting to fall together, slowly, meticulously.

_"Yes." _Walter had affirmed,_ "The complete opposite of E, its companion note, if you will. It's the yin of creation to the yang of destruction." _he'd rolled his hand in the air._ "If a key of E can destroy worlds, then it stands to reason-"_

_"A key of F can create one." _he'd interrupted, bracing himself against the lab desk, suggestion careening into him so hard, it knocked his breath away, tightened something like metal coils under his rib cage.

_"A genetic attribute your children biologically possess." _his father had said,_ "The first humans born of two separate universes with one resonating outcome. Now you see why we had to keep Henrietta safe, why we had to keep her hidden."_

_"You're telling me," _he'd said, absorbing,_ "that William Bell wants to use my children to create a third universe, a universe that doesn't physically exist... by what?...harnessing the frequency they're specific to? That essentially, my kids have the power to materialize an entire world from nothing?"_

He almost couldn't believe his own words.

_"Nothing comes from something, son," _Walter responded, sure,_ "Essentially it's matter, anatomically configured, structured by protons and neutrons into something substantial, tangible, so yes, through the power of the Machine, I believe it's possible yes, that's what I'm saying." _his father confirmed, his voice gruff, his hands still searching for something as Peter processed the clusterfluck he'd been hit with.

_"It must have been his bargaining chip with them,"_ his father said, "_Belly's. In return for his freedom, his life, he promised the enemy a new world, a new universe of their own, unstained, untainted from human wear, human life."_ he'd turned to him then,_ "I know it seems inconceivable son, impossible even to digest, but I've no doubt of the verity of this."_

Too many emotions had hit him then, all at once through the fog of his grappling ascertainment, bounced up, down and around inside, leaving him both cold with new numbness and hot with anger, repudiation.

And through it all he'd somehow found the thinking space to ponder how his father had known so much, could have come upon such monumental knowledge in such a short time.

Hours before, he hadn't any idea, no evidence at all that pointed to anything he'd just said.

_"Walter how do you know all this?"_ he'd questioned, carefully curious, looking up from the table he'd braced himself on, but the interrogated dodged the question, ignored it's importance to the task at hand._ "Walter," he'd said again, cautiously, "how-"_

_"It's not relevant," _his father interrupted, dashing to the back of the lab, searching, impatiently, for that something they came back for in a far-end closet._ "The how doesn't matter, what matters is that we know it, and what were going to do now because of it."_

Two more seconds and the distraught man found what was hidden, a eureka moment accentuated by the quick rise on his toes, the relief in his eyes.

Too suddenly, Peter'd recognized it, the detonator, the hand-held remote that controlled a cylindrical vessel he hadn't seen in ages. In a half a second, the realization choked his chest, rose the hair on his neck, squeezed his lungs until he'd thought they'd pop.

_"Walter what are you-," _Astrid begun to ask, from her listening point in the middle of the room, but there'd been an abrupt and loud shrill around them, red and orange lights flashing above their heads, the invisible alarm they'd configured set-off, tripped outside by invading encroachers.

He hadn't been able to properly react, to think through the noise before he'd heard Bell's voice, the man barging in midst their panic in under half a run.

Nothing else is as clear after that, as vivid to his memory, not after he'd taken in the empty space then where _she_ should have been, the place behind Bell where she should have followed. In that moment everything his father had told him, the mass extent of everything that'd hit his ears minutes before, had caved down, buried him whole with violent truth.

And then it's Bell's voice, he hazily remembers, defensive shouts through his pressured eardrums, his paralyzing shock.

_There was no time Peter_, he'd explained, through the whirlwind security,_ if I'd attempted to save us both, there wouldn't have been a chance for either of us._

A lie from a liar.

And then, it's his father's snarled accusations that play out in his mind, the cornered awareness Walter slapped on his old partner when he'd told Bell they knew the truth, they were on to his game. And in finishing, he'd shoved the detonator under the taller man's nose, switched it on, and vaguely, Peter remembers seeing the tank, hearing the drawn-out beep of the countdown over his pounding heart-beat, remembers watching as scattered Loyalists, guns drawn, broke down the door, and forced their way in.

Then the Amber erupted, and everything went dark.

He shakes the blackness from the forefront of his mind now, dry washes his face to release himself from slipping back into the fog of it. All the while, trying not to let the feel of his wedding band direct his thoughts again to somewhere else.

And it's when he drops his hands, that he notices Astrid in front of him, her small smile attempting to reassure him that she's a friendly interruption in the war of his revolve.

"Hey," she says to him, quietly, a hushed whisper to prevent from waking the rest of his family.

And in return, he smiles up at her, thankful all of sudden that she's saved him from himself. She looks to his right, her mouth's curve gaining width as she observes, affectionately, the sleeping woman.

As in all those years ago, she still has a soft spot for her self-proclaimed niece.

"Hard to believe she doesn't need a night light to sleep anymore."

He says, reflectively, not that his daughter was ever afraid of the dark. She just somehow always knew, life was better where the light was.

It shone brightly through the crack once.

"She looks just like her."

Astrid says to him, as she comes to sit on his vacated side.

"She always has."

He responds, his voice soft, being brought back, unforgivingly, to a thought he'd tried to escape with earlier distraction.

"I wish she could see her," he finds himself admitting, absently flipping over the note still in his hands. "That she could know our daughter's okay. That all the heartache we went through when we gave her up was worth it."

It's a lower of his chest to the floor, his immediate regret, a lamentation of a beautiful smile, an affection in eyes of olive-green gold he just won't see anymore.

All those years, he'd been too damn lucky to love something that loved him.

He swallows again to keep down the sudden hiccup of his heart, a sharp slice of ache that pierces through his whole body and numbs every muscle it can find.

"Hey, we'll figure out what happened Peter." Astrid assures, rubbing his arm gently, a motherly comfort to a scared child.

"What if we can't?" he questions, a rhetorical fear broke into the open, "What if we just...never know?"

It's now that he looks at her, and her eyes are slightly glossed, dark-cinnamon orbs that reflect the same fear, the loss of someone she cared for so deeply, too.

"Let's not make that an option now, okay?" she says simply, her voice too thin in her strive to console.

There's a tiny hope in the lines in her forehead, the bend of her lips' corner, and simply because he's not alone in the grand scheme of this, he finds himself taking it in stride, letting himself feel a tiny glimmer of it too.

To thank her, he smiles back, before his daughter shifts against him, sighs. And still looking at Astrid, his grin stretches.

"If she inherited her mother's stubborness, I'm in trouble."


	8. Part VII

**(Part VII) -2036-**

**{Etta}**

* * *

They haven't slept at all since the train car, since they arrived at the safe-house she grew up in, a place on the outskirts of the city, furnished, underground, indubitably passed over for it's exterior facade of a crumbling laundromat.

They've stayed up talking instead, he of her mother, of her childhood, of psuedo-fantastical things and two different universes. She spoke of her up-bringing, of Nina's careful watch, of her home under her sub-mother's wing as she'd learned to control the ability she'd discovered at seven.

She'd hijacked a loyalists car, an open-bed truck of weapons used to oppose the rebels, and she'd driven it into the first floor of their headquarters. She said it was an accident, when she was questioned, and she'd avoided harsh reprimand with mental persuasion, a power that tuned her little white lie to the sound of real truth.

Since then, she's honed it to her benefit, used it to smuggle things like medical supplies and essentials to the numbers districts, the poverty stricken neighborhoods that, to this day, are still trying to find structure after the three-year war.

There are barely liquid assets anymore, she told him this, no education, cultural rights or right of transit, even natural resources are sanctioned, crops and water and oil utilized and traded only by their say-so.

And unless it's produced in a South American chili field, food is artifically flavored, canned and preserved with no expiration date.

It's only people now, who bear the mark of decline.

Cigarettes and alcohol even, are sparse anymore, unreplenishable, so what's left of the stores can only be afforded by the inherently wealthy, a self-sophisticated class who make their money selling girls in the Red-light district.

It's the only place to find the ostentacious-brand of society.

None of the things Nina taught her of; educated her about through flash drives of secret records, pictures and articles of a before-world remain anymore, any skeleton of the sovereign history he comes from has been lost to new order.

All simple things are gone.

In this Observer dystopia, humans are prisoners, treated like rabid dogs unless bearing the mark of the enemy.

Freedom is mere concept.

The glimpses that appear in her mind's eye are like fading dreams, the faraway hazes of a four year old's memory that drift in and out of her conscious grasp.

Nothing anymore, will be recognizable to him, nothing but the chain that dangles from her collar.

She plays with it now, seated across from her father, watching closely as he digests the news she's just given him; that there are no female Observers because the Y chromosone died off in their lineage. Around the same time, it's assumed, that an evolved ULBP3 gene caused killer cell receptors to invade their hair follicles.

At least, that was Simon's theory.

In response, his face is a set of shock above the grappling registration he's worn for one and a half days, his meticulous absorption of this reality that's carved deep lines in his forehead, raised his brow in moments of unbelief, of realization.

It smooths only when he looks at her, as he looks at her now, with a soft affection that makes her want to smile, that warms her chest in a way she thinks she remembers, in the muddled recollection of a ten o' clock story-time, in the after-kisses of a messy food-fight, in the impossibly large arms of someone invincible as she falls asleep on his shoulder.

This is what the receiving end of fatherly-love feels like.

And she has to duck her head on the thought, feeling a blush come over her face, something soft peak in her veins, an unyielding devotion that heats from her heart to span through her whole body.

She knows already, she can't go without him for twenty years again either.

And it's when he studies her, his eyes a question of where in her head she's at, that she's hit instantly, with a memory-flash, a beautiful woman in the back-seat of a car, a hug, a kiss and a promise made somewhere in the past, tears that wet her little collar because the woman didn't want to let her go. And he's there, and he's grabbing her mother, and he's trying like hell to hold it all in, and this necklace isn't hers, but it's on him, and she's playing with it as she lays on his chest, marvels at it's shininess in the morning sunlight

She shakes it off, swallows hard as she looks at the dented pendant, and suddenly, she knows what she's supposed to do. She knows what this is.

So she slips the necklace off, and when she holds it out to him, dangles it over her fore-finger and thumb, he's taken-back, his posture hesitant, unsure, searching her face for a reason.

"This is yours." she tells him, recounting, "And a long time ago, I think I promised to give it back. I want you to have it back."

He inhales a deep breath, his reaction relegating, registering, and before he'll tell her to keep it, because she knows, by his naunced expression now, that he will, she rises, leans over the table to slip it over his neck.

It tenses him, when she does so, his whole body still as it falls to his chest, as though the weight of it wasn't an ounce but a ton, and she's sure he's quit breathing, as he focuses every sense on it, his hand reaching up to it slowly before his jaw muscles flex, a side-effect of incoming emotion.

It holds memories for him, delicate fragile moments he's forced to remember now, that are tearing him up from the inside out with pictures of her childhood, their home, that time and her mother.

And for a moment she's ashamed, terribly sorry she's caused him so much internal torment, but when he looks at her, he's wearing a small smile, the curve-break he's positioned over all that pain since the train, the genuine sight of gladness that cracks through the fragile veneer of something missed, something shattering that's been ripped from his heart and lost without trace.

As much as he tries, he can't hide her from it.

His eyes are glossy, holding back, and she almost wants to cry too because it hurts her inside that he hurts inside, and suddenly, without warning, he pulls her into him, his arms wrapping around her shoulders as his hand brushes through her hair.

"Thank you, Bullet." he whispers, and she feels his breath hitch as it sighs into their embrace, and it makes her close her eyes, hide her face in his neck as she holds onto him tighter.

No, she doesn't think she'll ever want to let go.

It would be impossible now.


	9. Part VIII

**(Part VIII) -2036-**

**{Peter} **

* * *

Using Bell's fingerprints, they'd gained access to Massive Dynamic's bio-metric vault.

The basement lair had been a window-dressing, a smoke screen set-up, a chamber in her company's tightest security wing Nina told the enemy held old social numbers, census info, economic predictions, and Geo-political statistics in the midst of a crumbling infrastructure. All the annals of dangerous information that, in the old days, could make or break nations.

There simply was no where else anymore to store such data, the labs and offices of Massive Dynamic having been overrun by the technological re-write of their prudent authority.

For twenty years, and to this day, it's a guise she'd successfully sold.

So in case, for any reason, she'd be compromised later, she'd long ago removed her clearance, insuring the enemy couldn't enter using her binary signature.

William Bell anymore, had been a traveling ghost with the only master key.

A principle, re-defined to less extraordinary, by the simple digital imprint of a hewed off right hand.

And when they'd devised the how of their operation, his daughter volunteered, her mind-shield the answer to their contemplative frowns. She'd searched out her sub-mother, kept close to her what was concealed in a Fringe Division satchel, and Nina had reported to the Loyalists, to suspicious Observers, that the blond woman's presence was due again, to back-ordered touch-screens. Clearly the agent had come at Headquarter's request.

It was only an hour later, when she'd brought them back the metal box, the only thing inside Bell's personal safe besides compressed empty air.

Inside were detailed schematics of the Rune Matrix, it's subsequent mechanics, encrypted drives they've yet to decipher and a portal device broken down to it's component pieces. They'd assumed he'd studied it, analyzed it, that must have been how he'd learned in the early days, so much of the Observer's mechanical fingerprint.

Already, they'd gotten one step closer to somewhere further.

Without having any answers still of where Olivia is, or how.

He'd tried not to hold his breath, when his daughter walked in with the trinkets, tried not to hope too much that in Bell's things would be a clue to where they would find her, could find her.

There had been nothing, and he'd passed off the plunge of his chest, the minutes of his silence for mere cogitation, simple thinking-over of where the new knowledge put them now, at this point in the fight.

But she'd sensed it, his baby girl, hadn't been convinced of his excuse as she watched the pendant he'd unconsciously grabbed fall back to his chest. He'd done all he could not to look at her, to see in her face a pain for him he wishes she'd let go.

It's not fair that she has to feel the brunt force of a loss she'd been too young to remember. There's a reason he hasn't told her just how badly he misses her mother, wants her back.

The hurt is devastating enough for one, it would kill the new happiness of another.

More so then it already has, in all the years it's left its subtle trace in beautiful blue eyes.

The two a.m silence of their safe-house is deafening now, like his torment, surrounding him in a pitch-black darkness save for the tiny desk light he shines on his workspace.

For the fourth time, just in case, he's re-analyzed Bell's things, attempted to make complete sense too, of the calculated logistics attributed to what will be their twenty-second century Oppenheimer invention.

But he's unable to connect more then scant relevance to certain particulars; associated parts presenting with specific bio-engineered duties, and he blames the loss of his concentration on mental fatigue.

And it incurs an almost physical unwillingness, and he hates himself for it. According to the needs of his hollowed-out nerves, nothing matters right now but finding _her_ truth.

And it's selfish, and it's wrong, and it's realistically impractical that after twenty something years, she'll come walking out of the dark in the same unsuspecting way that she'd left.

He wanted to believe Astrid, wanted to hope that she was right, that they'll figure all of this out, but he's having a hard time believing anymore in things like miracles.

At one point, he'd had three, and if the last one had been a boy he'd have teased his wife with ridiculous name choices until she'd end up agreeing, that one day, when it all got better, they'd get the Rottweiler terrier Bullet always wanted. If only to name him Lord Tyrion Drogo Baratheon Stark and not their firstborn son.

_I'm not giving birth to every character in a George R. R. Martin novel_, she'd have said behind her betraying amusement,_ we'll get the dog and you can call him anything you want besides Charlie, because that's what we're naming our son, okay?_ And when he'd smile at her, she'd laugh in his arms, because really, he could be a grown-up kid if it meant she'd wear that laughter forever.

But all that seems like a fading dream now, a lost future, one left as hopeless and docile as this reality, because it tears him up inside, rips him from sternum to gut to be so happy with his daughter, here, when he's so devastated by the loss of everything else.

Up didn't use to be down and down wasn't up. There was a point in time where he could cypher through confusion to find an unshaken middle-ground.

Right now, he just doesn't know what the fuck he should be feeling, what he deserved to feel, what he needed to feel, what she'd want him to do or what he owed her.

God, he was lost in so many more ways then just the differences of this world.

Blowing out a breath, he dry washes his face, sets his elbows on the table and tries to calm the headache that's pushing a steel fist into his cranium.

And it's when he lets his hands fall, that he eyes it, the tiny glint of gold wrapper that's sticking out from his father's bag, and he squints, turns the light around to be sure of what he's seeing, and instantly, numbness make it's way down his back.

Carefully, he plucks the confection from the bag, turns it over in his palms until he reads the front, in the logo, an accidental double print of the candy bar's last vowel.

There's no fucking way...


	10. Part IX

**(Part IX) -2036-**

**{Peter}**

* * *

"Walter, wake up."

After his third attempt to arouse him, his father is still a lump under disheveled blankets, a heap of a body under the stitched cover of green and blue patchwork. Soundly snoring, he remains unmoving as Peter pushes against his father's shoulder with more pressure this time.

"C'mon Walter, I'm not going to do this all night. I'm not playing this game with you, you need to get-"

"Pique down will you, you're going to wake the neighborhood!"

His father's voice hisses, groggy, as he turns down the corner of the blanket until a curly head of graying hair gives way to an aged, blinking focus.

But he's not patient enough for the waking man to register the intrusion, instead it's his anxious nerves that guide him when he holds up what he'd grabbed from the zipper compartment.

"How long have you had this candy bar, Walter?" he asks, slowly, his own voice squeezing his eardrums as the questioned sits up, "Where did you get it?"

In answer, his father squints, his face an instant set of silence, a fifth amendment of age lines and deep creases under narrowly set green-ore.

He's less then forthcoming for a reason, and his eyes still high, they find a newly interesting spot on the floor, dark tile where the other room's desk light filters in, and Peter has to bite back his impatience at his father's mulishness.

"Goddammit, Walter-"

"From her, from Olivia."

This claim steals the feeling from his lungs, makes his forehead hurt from his frowns intensity, his confusion's sore imprint.

"When Walter? When did she give this to you?"

"When she came to me. Twenty years ago, in the lab."

Trying to understand, he's careful with his next question, sits down on the cot behind him before he asks it.

"She talked to you before she left?

"Personately, yes." his father responds, his voice stern at the start. "But not in the way you're reffering, not in the simple fundament of the general pretense."

Clueless, he's lost, the private correlating sounding a lot like nonsense. Again.

"What are you talking about, Walter. How did you get this?"

"I thought it was a hallucination at first," he begins to explain, his tone straight-laced, deep. "A biped fantasy caused by the rather large herbal concoction I'd ingested beforehand. But it wasn't. She was real, Peter, as real as you and I are sitting here now. "

"What?"

He has to blink through the confoundment, not sure entirely, if he wants to grasp onto the radical notion the suggestion was forming.

"She'd told me she'd confiscated a portal device from them," He hears, "from the Observers, used it to travel time they way they do, in the same linear fashion. To my surprise and great disappointment, she told me coffee would only be chewed in twenty years." In the darkness, his father's face turns to a look of disgust, "She was right. It's rather distasteful in masticated form."

As if the words were a simple enough explanation, perceivable to the average person, he says no more, merely sits, leaving the air punctuatingly sedate.

"You're serious."

Peter states, his words sounding more surprised then he'd intended them, trying deep inside, to remember that he should expect these left-field explanations.

His ascertainment just needs a way to work all this out.

"Of course I am." his father responds, his voice short, his brow line portraying the slight offense he'd just taken, "I'd think you'd know by now, Peter, that time has no objective existence, it's merely a subject construct. It shouldn't be so inconceivable for you to believe that Olivia could have-"

"I gave her this candy bar, Walter, " he interrupts, unable to bear a rant in the face of this surreal mindfuck, "two days before I last saw her."

Because of this, a set of eyes, un-aged for twenty years, frowns on new thought.

"Well, I suppose now that I can rule out an alternate iteration of her."

And as his father ponders something, alone to himself, all this information begins to register it's reality, the sequential working of his right-brain handing over his incognizance to the crushing hand of hard realization.

And it hits him now; the answer he'd wanted long ago.

"She's how you knew isn't she?" he asks, more a statement then question. "When I'd asked you in the lab twenty years ago how you knew of Bell's plan, how you knew of his intent, it's because she came to you. She knew somehow and she told you, didn't she?"

"Yes. She did that." Walter confirms, and when he brings something out from the blankets, Peter recognizes again what had been shoved in his hand years before.

"And she gave me this." his father says, holding up the tiny machine. "Said this device would be our only chance, that we'd have to build it. And that we'd have to do so in the future, in the year that they'd come for us, Agent Foster and my grandchild."

Another light bulb flicks on in his mental compartment, the expanse of his psyche that's suddenly radiating at warp-speed.

"Jesus, that's why you'd Ambered us."

The older man nods.

"She'd said I'd figure it out, that I'd already discovered a way to suspend time without stopping it."

It's all too heavy to take in, so he's speechless now, in the wake of absorption, filtering through the process dust with a hand to his lower face, his fore-finger and thumb curved to his chin.

"She came to me then, Peter," he hears his father say, after momentary silence, "so we could be here now.

"And if I hadn't been severely influenced at the time, I can't say I wouldn't have worn the same look you are now. Though, with a bit more fascinated open-mindedness. Even as a boy you had a rather timid imagination." Where there once may have been a slight smile, his father's face remains affectless, "You never were inclined to accept the possibilities of the impossible so easily."

After he swallows, the breath he takes is subtle, sufficient for what experience has brought him.

A proclivity to believe.

"It's not as hard for me now as you might think."

He responds, turning his attention back to the chocolate bar in his palms, and after a quiet five seconds, he's consumed by a new question that flips his chest upside-down.

"I know what you're going to ask," his father says, before he can ask it, "If I know where she is, how she is, but I'm afraid I don't have that answer. As you should know, the definites are undeterminate when viewing time re-placement from outside of it.

"But, I can assure you from whatever year she came from, whatever place, she didn't appear endangered. In fact, she didn't appear troubled at all."

This should bring him some kind of relief but it doesn't, only makes his desire for more answers ten times larger. Until he knows everything for certain, he'll be tied to the whipping post of what he desperately wants back.

"I have faith that where ever she is, Olivia's well. " his father says, "And I'd wager, that in time, we'll have the sense to know exactly where that is."


	11. Part X

**(Part X) -2036-**

**{Etta}**

* * *

Three days later, they go back for Simon.

They'd mapped out their mission down to the letter. While Astrid and her grandfather stay behind to dissect the blueprint's entirety, plan-out how it is they'll construct it, where and how they'll gather the parts in secret, she and her father were to rescue her partner.

They signed out a short-burst to do so, an EMP device that confuses in-ground security signatures, knocks out any exterior detector within a two mile radius.

They're going to need it to sneak into Harvard Yard, back into the Amber infected lab once called a second home, the place, he'd told her, where she'd beg him to let her peer into the microscope too, after she'd clamber into his lap.

_You loved it there,_ he'd said, as he'd handed her the device she'd zipped into their backpack, _You even begged us to have your bed put next to grandpa's. If he got to sleep there, then why couldn't you?_

He'd smiled, as he'd recollected the memory, his eyes free for a second, of the vulnerability that's consistently shading them to an almost transclucent blue-gray.

_In my defense,_ he'd stated, throwing his hands up, _I was never against it. I always said if we exposed you to everything Walter at a young enough age, then you'll be an expert at dealing with crazy people for the rest of your life. It's what you'd need to get use to. You were our daughter, after all._

And then he'd passed her the wand, the mechanism he'd fixed a day and a half earlier, standing over a crowded table of tecnological tools while he'd recounted, to her itching ears, of her Birthday cake ice cream profusion and the mess it would always make on her chubby little cheeks.

She'd learned then how fast he can deduce mechanical intricacy, how effortlessly he understands anything with wires, coils and tubes, and it only augmented her admiration, the child-like awe that filled up her wonder conclave, the place where she'd gotten giddy on the inside with something she knew once.

At four years old, he'd been bigger then the world to her, a superhero with no cape, and at twenty four, absolutely nothing had changed.

And it'd been after the ice cream story when he'd set down the precision testers, and the electrical torch, his face suddenly a strangle of ache under the desklamp; the pensive look he'd been wearing when she'd entered the room at the start.

Then he'd gripped the edge of the table with both hands, the pendant she'd once wore, dangling down as he'd leaned his weight on his forearms, worried his bottom lip as he'd fought to navigate through the private stress that'd suddenly overcome him.

_I don't know, Bullet,_ he'd started to say, when he'd finally managed it,_ if you're going to believe anything I'm about to tell you._

He'd told her then, what her grandfather had said hours before, spoke of a candy bar and her mother and his surpise, and the shock-wave meaning of it all that knocked him far back and sideways.

And like he'd been, she was hit up-side the head with it's fantasm, with the incredible open-mindedness that kind of truth asked for and it'd been anxious ants that had skittered under her skin, scathed at her chest wall with prickly little feelers.

But it'd been excitement's tickle, not fear's.

What he'd said had meant that there was still a chance, a fool's hope that her mother was somewhere out there, and she didn't have to feel the emptiness of missing her so damn much for the rest of her life.

To her father's surprise, her reception had been fast, easy, and under his reasoning frown, she'd explained that when you grow up in a world that already defies everything natural, nothing shocks you anymore.

_This means there's still hope,_ she'd told him, coming to stand across the desk, _that maybe mom isn't gone for good, that there's still a chance for us to get her back. Dad...,_ carefully, she'd pressed into his airspace,_ we have to figure out how to follow this. I mean, maybe all we have to go on is nothing besides something that happened to grandpa a long time ago, but it's still something. It's still more then what we knew before._

Cautiously, internally, her father deliberated then, his poise and eyes careful not to get caught up in her enthusiam, a relutance of pale-gray that said he'd already filled his lifetime qouta of vain hope and it's heartache.

He'd reached out then, cupped her cheek in his palm, and his mouth bent up slightly, subtly, and the small smile had told her that whatever positivity she'd been feeling, whatever excitement, he'd wanted her to keep alive in herself.

It'd have been a wasted effort, to try and make him feel the strength in it too.

_Let's start by digging your partner out first, okay?_

And it was after they'd made their way out of the safe-house, after he'd thrown their bag of equipment into the back of the unregistered car, and opened the passenger's door from the inside handle that he'd stopped, looked over at her.

_You have her tenacity_, he'd said, out of nowhere, that ash color washing into his stare, molding his brow with fragile lines, his face in the pain that comes but won't go, _I always told her you would._

Then he'd said nothing else about it, as she drove them to the Epi-Center of an Anti-Utopia's Metropolis.


	12. Part XI

**(Part XI) -2036-**

**{Etta}**

* * *

With Broyle's help they fudged papers, documents saying he's a member of this decade's Fringe division, an agent designated to the warehouse district, assigned to the sector of illegal dealings, a duty to maintain and apprehend the civilian underground suspected of fresh water trading, commodities handling.

A list that grows longer everyday...with Nina's generous aid.

And as it has done, the Division pretends not to notice, turns a blind eye.

No creature wanting to survive bites the robotic hand that feeds. They owe it their lives.

There was a look of approval, when she'd told him this, as they'd made their way through a busy Metro Station, his perpetual pride in her silver-headed guardian obviously apparent as he'd wordlessly applauded her rebellious outfit.

_God, this place is like being in a George Lucas movie_, he'd said then, over the hustle of frantic passer-bys as he'd taken in his surroundings, the scrolling text that littered the glass sky-dome, the vending stations; the stands of what edible concessions were allowed civilians if they'd provided the right tokens, if they'd been well behaved for long enough. _It's like an airport mall that's swallowed every installment of Star Wars._

Not understanding she'd frowned, and when he'd turned back to her, the awe in his features had fell in harsh realization, in an almost quick sadness before his quiet "._..nevermind_". It'd been real to him then, how much she'd never share with him, how many inside things of his cultural history would simply be lost on her.

And it'd made something inside her plunge a little, as they arrived at their checkpoint; the gate to their train into a dwindling Manhattan.

For the third time since he's been here, they'd had to deal with the transit authority. This instance, a portly Loyalist who's chubby finger had pointed at her father in suspicion, who'd rose a thick brow at the cylindrical device in the questionable man's backpack. In response, the suspected had been suave, impressive, charming in the way people are when they're use to talking their way into places.

Or out of them.

It'd been instantly apparent where she'd gotten that talent.

The insufferable agent had been cautious, skeptical, the mark on his cheek, tattooed over an old scar that moved when his mouth twitched, but finally, he'd been satisfied with his examination and allowed their passage.

"The Nazi look suits him." her father comments now, after he tosses the bag back on his shoulder, and when he folds his papers up, shoves them back in his jeans pocket, he does so while dodging the crowd with blind ease.

This remark she gets, understands because of the reams of pictorial, old war history Nina's lessons burned into her reading-eye's fascination.

And when she laughs, breathy, she feels his gratitude, the surprising leap in his chest because her familiarization brought him comfort, gave him hope.

There's more then relation here, more then a simple, deep love, that transcends two decades, and he's just witnessed the emerge, gave into the reality that not everything between them has to be so uncommon, so strangely one-sided in the moments when he forgets she doesn't know things.

And it's a bit awkward, she thinks now, leading him through the steel panel exit doors, a bit suppressing to look at him and see her father when everyone else sees her new partner, a stranger from the Bronx who joined the Force because his brother was killed by a civilian gang in year four.

At least, that's what it says in his crisply typed new ancestry, his re-written identity stamped in a dossier, a prim stack of three folder's concealing the past of three different people.

Her family.

"It must be pretty strange for you...," she remarks, as they step outside, are hit by the thick dreary air that's covered this side of the maglev tracks for too long. "Not being able to say you're my dad."

His laugh is quick, short, an eager breath long-suppressed in this reality, a humor found in the anomolous circumstances he's lived out so far.

"Not nearly as strange as being fifty something years old." he responds, taking in the numbered platforms, the bustle of waiting passengers eager to take their leave into the City.

"I always pictured me balding by now." he jokes, and it makes her laugh, as she shoves her hands in her brown bomber.

"You should feel lucky." she responds. "The natives would kill to look so young at your age."

After this he stops, and when she looks up at him, his smile is wide, peeking a straight line of teeth from behind his top lip.

"And just when I couldn't be more proud, she jokes." he says, those eye-crinkles gaining depth, "You must be my kid."

"I'd like to think so."

She tells him, competing with his grin, and it's that fuzzy-warm feeling she gets again, when his eyes shine, the one that's become customary now as he looks at her this way.

And the moment presses into both their chests, an air of mutual affection that tickles up her spine, fills her heart muscle with the sensation of a soothing massage; his hand up and down her back as she rests her four year old head in the crook of his neck.

It's all in the clearing fog of their use-to-be days.

"If by chance you remember what that smile gets you," he says, his voice light, teasing, "you should know I ran out of suckers twenty years ago."

"Guess I'll have to settle for new memories then."

Still beaming at her, he nods, and when he turns his head to the side, diverts his eyes, he runs a hand over the stubble that shadows his jaw. And when heather-blue finds her again, she realizes he'd stolen away from the moment to keep in an old one.

But there's no show it was painful, as the corner of his mouth gains new height.

"Lucky for you I have plenty of those left."

He finally says, and he surprises her, when he closes the distance between them, throws an arm over her shoulders, and hugs her, so tightly, to his side, she can't breathe.

And it's when he kisses the crown of her head, she understands the memory he'd tampered back, the overwhelm of his insides because he couldn't help again but want to hold her this way.

And she closes her eyes tight, as she presses into him too, leather and cotton and aqua a memory to her olfaction, a scent reminding her again, after twenty something years, what solace smells like.

Every time she'd fall asleep on his chest, when that warm feeling would cascade over them both, he'd show her love like this, with his lips pressed into her tiny blond curls.

And being here now, with her, felicitates that rare happiness, a secret joy lost in the beginning of this fucked-up Dystopia.

For so long, without even knowing, she missed this so badly, too.

And with a new smile, she tugs on his jacket, guides him by the waist to her left.

"C'mon, dad, our dock's this way."


	13. Part XII

**(Part XII) -2036-**

**{Etta}**

* * *

The ground is wet, muddy, slushy under her sneakers as they make their way to the timeworn Kresge building's side door, their treads fast, sneaky, careful. Five feet from the entrance and she watches as he buries the low-tech artifice into a prime patch of mud, turns on the switch and there's a secondary shrill, a push of her eardrums and she winces.

"Showtime." he says, "C'mon." and she falls into his lead.

They have ten minutes until the short-burst looses its charge, until its positive polarity stops blocking the perimeter's motion sensors and gives away their position.

"Dammit. It's locked." he says, as he gets to the door, his hands brushing over a technological keypad unfamiliar to the catalog of his past jimmies, the many victories of his con-man skill. "I don't recognize what kind of lock this is. I don't know if I can disarm it."

As she meets up to him, one look at the device, and she knows it instantly.

"You can't." she says, taking the lead as he moves from her way, "It''s a security grid hub, the prototype came out a year ago. They must have installed it after we'd pulled you from the Amber."

"To prevent us from doing what we're doing?" he questions, sardonically, "Smart move." then a breath. "Clearly, it's working."

An appreciatory grin, and she starts clicking in numbers, the first pattern chiming it's refused access with a buzz. "There's a six-sequence code to every one of these things, usually some variation of three, six and twelve. We have four tries until it blocks us out completely, lights this whole place up like a curfew search light. I had an underground runner who knew the most popular of it's number strings."

She frowns when again, she's unsuccessful. Tagging in what she has, she should have cracked the damn thing by now.

"None of which seem to be working." She reports, trying for irritation and not panic.

"We'll we have two minutes and one turn left, so-wait!-stop."

He stalls her hand, as she goes to punch a number again, and when she looks at him his eyes are thin, studying the lock, his brow a frown as if he where solving some mental puzzle and this device was the slow-coming answer. He runs a gloved finger over the hub's tiny front panel, traces the red-triangular insignia of it's logo.

And suddenly his every movement, even his breath, seems to stop.

He's just worked out his answer.

"...holy shit," And his shock only piques her curiosity, magnifies her confusion, as he reaches for something out of his back pocket, and when he plucks a tiny paper from his billfold, he pushes the wallet into her hands.

"Here sweetie, hold on to this."

He says, as he makes quick move to open up the folds against it's indented creases. Then, suddenly, he flips the page over, but in the darkness, the beam of her flashlight shines the paper-fibers translucent, so she can't begin to make out ink.

Suddenly he's pressing numbers into the keypad, every different digit a low-tone, until suddenly the pad lights to green, and the door clicks open.

With forty seconds to spare, he'd gotten them in.

"How did you do that?" she asked him, too surprised in the moment to do little more then stand there. ""How did you know the right sequence?"

"I didn't." he says, a sly smile curving his lips slightly as he holds the door open, "Your mom did."

She doesn't understand, is too bombarded with the hodge-podge of his logic that her mind suddenly feels hazy behind her skull and her frown.

"Trust me, kiddo," he says, checking behind them for foot guards as he ushers her inside by her elbow, "We don't have the time right now."


	14. Part XIII

**(Part XIII) -2036-**

**{Etta}**

* * *

It takes them under three and a half minutes to set up the level-two tech.

The Augmentation buffers, the wand, they're simple concepts that seem almost to trivial for her father's genius mind, but he's praising their clever construct as she connects the pads at Simon's interred feet.

"I never had a toy like this when I was your age." He says, keying a command into the device's control box. "I would have...ow!..Fuck!"

When she looks up at him, he's shaking his hand in the air, his face a clench of surprise and mild aggravation.

Short-shocks are common in electrical devices checked out of the impound station, and when her father puts the side of his finger against his lips;a wet tourniquet for the violation, she thinks that maybe she should have told him it might have a slight defect a little bit sooner.

"Agh..," he moans again, his full attention on his finger, "Goddammit...that stings."

And when he turns back to her as if he'd forgotten, in the moment, that she'd been here, his face is a shy, almost shamed set of planes highlighted in yellow by the halogen light that's bouncing off the Amber.

"Sorry..." he shrugs, as he gives her a coy grin, and it takes her a second to understand it's not his scene but his earlier, four letter language he was aplogizing for.

It only makes her want to laugh.

"It's okay." she assures him, securing the last pad, "I started using that word at six."

As she gets up, she dusts her hands on the side of her jeans and when he leans against their set-up table, he chuckles lightly, types into the keypad.

"You really are a chip off the ol' block."

It's the same pride in his eyes when he looks up, that she saw at the station, a sparkle of light blue that eats through, for an instant, the dark-slate of everything else he doesn't want her to feel.

It's twenty-two years too late for that.

"I suppose though," he says, clearing his throat, clearing the air, "that it's my parental obligation to tell you to watch your language."

"Yes sir."

"See? Whoever said discipline is difficult, obviously doesn't know what they're talking about."

She responds by giving him a small smile when she comes to stand beside him, and it's after he returns in kind, that she hears the device's power leveling up.

Preparing, she points the wand at the transparent marble, the chunk of solidified gas that holds her partner, and for an instant, she can't help feel a little excited, an anticipatory collecton of her nerve-ends that expands out in her chest.

Her past with this man, is another story for another time that maybe, she'll tell her father about. As willing as she's been to tell him her life's story so far, there are certain intimate aspects she's a bit shy to recount.

Even to Nina when she'd questioned, months ago, under a suspicious brow, just why it is she's so close to Agent Simon Foster. He's a good man, she'd responded simply, and quite frankly, he's the only one anymore that I know I can trust.

Conveniently, she'd left out the part where they'd emptied the bottle of Gin he'd been gifted by a thankful Red-light hauncho, a street owner who's life had almost ended, abruptly, by the civillan hand of alcohol thieves, and they'd woke the next morning, cotton-mouthed, laughing and naked in his bed.

Waiting for her father's countdown, watching him concentrate hard on the keypad while it communicates, she assumes there are things about her that maybe, he wouldn't know how to digest so comfortably.

Quietly, she smirks to herself, thinking of the nervous, uneasy twitch he'll rub out of his neck, shift through to his feet, if she were to tell him, right now, that she's used this man's toothbrush.

This daughter thing may still be a little new, but her pereception tells her it's okay to keep a few things a secret.

"Okay," he says, bringing her back into the moment, his eyes on the console as the activation light turns green. "Ready, Freddy?"

He asks, and when she nods, she's tickled by the childhood phrase, then she presses the wand into the honey-colored geode, bracing herself.

"Three...two..." she presses the trigger while he hits the red release button, "Kauwabunga."

And instantly, the Amber gives way, a smoke of yellow that blinds her vision while there's a crash in the distance; Simon's propelled form hitting their workstation, knocking it to the floor.

And when she drops the wand, rushes over to her partner, her father's already pressing the hydro-syringe into Simon's wrist.

As the rescued sucks in air in large breaths, her dad injects it, and Simon's coherency is grasping, navigating through trumatic bewilderment, and she looks down on him, pats his chest as she tells him it's okay, he's out of the Amber now.

"Etta?" he questions, still catching oxygen, and there's a slow realization in his gray-bown understanding, a latch of reality that's creased his forehead, rose his brows.

She nods, and when he turns to her father, those creases etch-out his frown as he points to him.

"Yeah," says the man at the end of Simon's finger, "I'm the guy who owes you the world's biggest Thank you."

And suddnely, it's awe that colors her partner's stare, the kind of wonder and admiration he feels toward every member of the team, who, he told her years ago, deserve the title of heroes for everything they've accomplished. Everything that they stood for.

Everything that they were.

This opinion, she thinks, only makes her appreciate him more.

"Peter Bishop?" questions Simon, more a personal cultivation, then confusion, and her father laughs, holds out his hand.

"Not according to my shiney new papers. But yeah, that's me. Now, c'mon, let's get you off this floor."

They stand up, the three of them, and Simon wobbles, grabs his head for a moment as her father holds him up with his arm.

"If you think the headache's bad now, just wait a couple hours. You'd almost wish you stayed in there."

In response her partner chuckles through a wince, and when he fully takes in her father for the first time since his concrete perch, his mouth lifts at the corner.

"It was an honor to take your place, Agent Bishop. To have you here now, in the flesh, in our presence. It's truly a pleasure."

"Can't say I get that very often." her father responds, but she can see, from the slight blush, he's immensely flattered. "Trust me, Agent Foster, the pleasure's all mine. You did push my ass out of there, after all. All I did was press a button."

"None-the-less," Simon says, straighting, his face a set of genuine adoration. "I'm glad you're here. This means we truly have a chance now, to make this world a better one. I've never-"

His words are cut off, suddenly, by the flicker of the flood lights, a blinking static that seems to rustle the furniture around them, shake everything loose in the room with an invisible magnetism.

"Are you doing that?" he questions her, and trying to squelch down her rising panic, she shakes her head.

"No. It's not me."


	15. Part XIV

**(Part XIV) -2036-**

**{Etta}**

* * *

Faster now, the lights fizzle, the machines jump, sparks of an electric current that's charging the air, squeezing her eardrums to full pressure.

Then instantly, everything blinks out, a darkness that covers the smell of over-heated wires, fused out electricity.

Then a flashlight beam breaks through the black, her father's switched on lantern, and for a second, he's impossibly still, listening like she, to the sudden echo of metal, a sound behind them like something being pushed against a hollow steel door.

"Oh my god, it can't be..." he says.

And before she can understand, he's running to the corner of the dark lab, somewhere she doesn't know, but she follows, as does Simon, and the flashlight's beam is their only guide through the overturned tables, the broken scientific instruments strewn on the floor.

"Dad, what-"

She can't get the question out, before he hands the newly ejected their light source, and throws a dirty, dusty grey sheet off what's reverberating the echo.

Confused, and alarmed, Simon exchanges a glance with her under the thin line of light, but all she can do is shrug, telling him she's no idea either, what the hell is going on.

Until she recognizes, suddenly, what her father's uncovered, the large incubation tank from the pictures stored in her Mind's eye, a sudden memory of Astrid straying her away from it's hinges, _you don't want to hurt yourself sweetie, you could get your fingers pinched._

And quickly, before her vision even clears, he's thrown open the heavy doors, and she hears the sound of water resting in a hollow drum.

And it's quiet, so quiet before her father reaches into the receptacle, and then suddenly, without warning, the surface breaks, propels something forward and her heart leaps back, like Simon has, jumps in shock as she hears heavy breaths of gasping air.

He's pulled her to his chest, the woman who's appeared, her blond hair soaking wet, drenched like the rest of her, as she clutches his jacket, pulls at his clothes as she takes in oxygen, and it's like he doesn't even notice; doesn't care he's getting wet too.

And as she takes in the sight, her pulse stops working all together, losing its beat in the same place her lungs have hollowed out, hit the floor in a numb awareness, a paralyzing discertion.

_Oh god._

In milli-seconds, Simon moves to aid them, but she grabs his arm, yanks him back.

"No, wait," she says, her voice hushed, shocked, all the while wanting to give her dad this moment. "Not yet."

And they both watch as her father's eyes digest the woman in his arms, the optic-wall of personal angst he's worn since he got here finally breaking down with a liquid, pale-blue gladness, the one that appeared when the woman did, a new felicity that webs into his features, wrinkles his eye lines with the kind of love she saw everytime he'd speak of her childhood.

"I don't understand. Who is that?" Simon asks her, an accented whisper in the air, and she swallows, feels her mouth curve, her blood turn-over so frivolously in her veins, she almost wants to cry, almost wants to collapse to the floor with the joy that's warming everything under her rib-cage.

"That's my...," she begins, quietly, the thought tasting too good in her mouth before she says it, and over her emerging tears, she has to start over. "Simon, I think that's my mom."

Beside her, she feels his bafflement, the head-scratching line that embeds itself between his brows in the rare times he can't make sense of things, and it occurs to her now, that she hasn't told him who her dad is, her grandfather, but she doesn't elaborate still, because there'll be time for that later.

She only watches, entranced.

"Peter, oh Peter," her mother says against his chest, her breath labored yet as she claws at his collar. "I know what he's going to do, Bell, I know what his-I know what his plan is. I was in the machine, and I knew and it just-it..."

She stops abruptly, interrupted, it seems, by the new feeling at her fingertips, the necklace she's relexively tangled her fingers into and she has to blink to focus in on it, to absorb the meaning.

It wasn't on him that she'd seen it last.

Against her mother's palm, it gleams in the flashlight's beam, a gold beacon that shines through particles of dust as her father wipes the dripping beads of water from her mom's cheeks, her forehead, and the end of her nose. And suddenly, in the same way they blinked out, the overhead lights flicker back on, grabbing her attention, and the wand and its control panel, they level back up too, and when she turns back to her parents, there's a silent communication that's piercing between them.

It fills the air with the breath of slow comprehension, her mother's articulation as her eyes move from his, to the hung bullet and back up, her adhering adaption making her look over now, for the first time, at the company in the room.

His wasn't the neck she'd slipped it on, and there's only one reason now, why he would have it.

Beacuse he's found their daughter, and she's given it back.

And the study has Etta un-moving, her whole body lifeless, void of feeling, a self-conciousness hinged in an olive-green question, a reaching understanding behind a desperate, almost hopeful set of attractive features, and when they turn back to her father, he nods his head, his forehead coming to press into the side of her mother's face, his lips grazing over her cheek to rest above her ear.

He whispers something, quite a bit of somethings, and her mother's breath releases, the gulp of air she'd been holding since she'd discovered the necklace, and her focus is on nothing particular, while she still clings to him, lets what he's said sink in, a percolation of knowledge that's reeming into her full-force.

She knows what he's told her mother; that this woman is their full-grown little Bullet, and she's more beautiful then either one of them could have hoped.

And suddenly, despite her damp form, despite the blue in her lips or the shiver in her body, her mother's face breaks out in a smile, a beautiful stretch of her mouth that gains width when she looks at him, and when gently, she grasps his face in her hands, there's something silent that pulses between them, an almost magnetic electricity that Etta feels, somehow, sparking the air.

Then her mother kisses him, and it's passionate and it's yearning and hungry in the way something missed is found again, treasured to new heights, and for a second she feels like an intruder, a third party to a moment meant for the two of them, and when Simon clears his throat at her side, averts his eyes by dipping his head, she knows he's feeling a tad bit uncomfortable too.

Though, she has to admit, she can't help the warmness that's filling her to the brim, like a pleasent ending to a film that leaves you happy, satisfied, undoubtedly content.

Those still exist because _They_ like them too.

They break for air now, her parents, and after her thumb brushes over his bottom lip, her mother's fingers brush over the necklace again, taking in its realness. Then she trails his arm to find his hand, and when she squeezes it, there's something wordless between them again, in their private exchange, and it's when she gets up, that he balances her, his hands on her waist, then against her backside when she stands up alone.

The air is heavy suddenly, as her mother looks at her again, her eyes a green-gloss because of what's five feet infront of her, and again, Etta feels her breath stall, as though she's a young cadet again, waiting for approval, acceptance, recognition, and she wants to speak, wants to say "_hi"_ or "_hello"_ or "_I'm Etta"_ but paralysis is leaving her speechless, immobile, nervous.

Then, in no time at all, her mother closes the distance, her hand reaching out to caress her cheek in the same soft way she remembers, in a faraway dream hinged in a tiny girl's memory. And then it's the other palm she feels against her face, clammy from a wet journey, but warm with it's tenderness.

And as she looks into her mother's eyes, it's the same overwhelming affection she sees in her father's, a bottomless capture of love and devotion; an unbreakable bond that defies things like time and fringe science to remain unyielding, fortified through the deepest connection imagined, or created, that can be held in one gaze.

And instantly, she's no longer apprehensive, no longer afraid that this woman, this beautiful woman who just magically appeared out of nowhere in a rusty tank full of water, is going to find her substandared, mediocre, a poor subsitute for who she'd imagined her daughter to be, and it's when she finallly lets herself breathe that her mother's eyes are close to spilling over, a fragile joy that's given her pale cheeks color, but suddenly sets her face in a new nervousness that threatens to break it.

And it makes her drop her hands, as if she remembers, suddenly, that she's merely a stranger to this young girl, and when her bottom lip quivers, it's not from the chill of her wet clothes, but the shaky breath she takes in.

And when she swallows, she straightens to brace herself against an impending dissapointment, an up-coming heartache.

"Do you-" her mother whispers, her eyes careful, searching, as hesitantly, she reaches out again, "Do you know who I am?"

But her mom doesn't have time even to consider a sad answer, before Etta's thrown her arms around her shoulders, closes her eyes so tight, it pains her lids, and she feels her mother sigh into her, her embrace a tight hug that she remembers from years ago, in the back of a car with tears staining her neck, trailing into her windbreaker before the hands of catastrophe yank them apart.

"Mom." Is all she can say now, her voice cracking as she buries her face in the woman's shoulder, and there's a breath of relief, a sound of joy that reverberates in her mother's soft laugh, and it's all too overwhelming, this moment, this realization that here, in this room, is the rest of her home, the completion of a family that she's longed for for twenty years.

And the feel of her arms are too perfect, too safe and wonderful, just like her dad's are. This is where she belongs in a world that's fucked up and upside down, and she lets herself cry, silently, lets her tears catch in her mother's damp jacket as her hair is raked through, brushed by fingers that's missed the feel for so long.

"Hi, baby." she hears, "Hi, sweetheart."

And it's the last thing her mother manages to say, the last words she can muster out before an all-consumming exhaustion, the book-end force of her magical appearing, makes her fall limp in her daughter's arms.


	16. Part XV

**(Part XV) -2036-**

**{Olivia}**

* * *

They told her she came to Walter, twenty years ago, speaking of the things she'd seen in the Machine; but she has no idea of it.

She only remembers the pull of her conciousness; a floating abyss that somehow held answers in it's blackness, a place where time stopped, nothing existing but her breath and the knowledge, and then it was water that swallowed her, water that entombed her, a wet coffin that threatened to bury her alive before his hands pulled her out, before they collapsed to the lab floor in a heap of wet bodies, a tumble of inertia and her grasping lungs.

Everything in the middle is a lost concept, a mind fog of fuddled patches, a fuzzy headache that she can't quite discern through, and can't quite decipher.

She doesn't know now, that she even wants to.

It would only add to all the things she has to fathom, understand.

There's no memory after the morning she left, stepped into the Machine because then it's the blackness, the blackness and his hands, and it all felt like a time span of mere minutes, a clock with a quickening slow hand.

In reality though, they'd told her, it'd been decades.

And it's the smell of antiseptic and latex that's surprsingly famliar here now, in this scarcely furnished hospital room, they're kind to her memory, unchanged after years of transition; a world's unwarrented abuse.

In what once would have been a patient bed, she lays here, scoots further down what's now a chaise, a tilted cushion the size of three people, the adjustable rail insuring she won't fall to black tile.

So much is different here, unrecognizable, even the vitals moniters are different, no longer hovering above the floor on stands, but attached overhead to the room's wide-reaching lamp arm, a white-metal snake that stretches at least four more feet to her right, fading out before the start of a floor to ceiling rectangular wall-panel.

At one point, it might have been a window.

When humans were allowed creature comforts like sunlight, it probably was.

Her eyes, suddenly heavy, she rubs them, noting the dull pound on the back-side of her skull as she does so, the phantom ringing in her hearing, the underwater fingerprint left in her ear's muscle memory, and she shakes off claustrophobia's ghost, the constriction, the panic in her chest, siezing in her body the moment when she'd realized, suddenly, that she'd been trapped in that tank.

And it makes her shiver, not from cold, but fear's fatigue, a harsh mental trauma and again, she has to will it back to the place in her mind she doesn't want to go. There's so much more she could be thinking of, the only handful of better things this world will ever give her.

The thought alone implodes in her chest, the realization of her daughter, here in this world, her little baby girl grown now into a beautiful woman, still, somehow, smelling of baby oil and berries, the memory of her four year old's scent, the one that would have remained forever caught in the threads of his jacket.

Again, she feels a burn behind her eyes, water pooling at their corner's and she uses her thumb pad and index to sop them up, keep them at bay.

_It's her_, he'd told her, when she'd been drenched, unclear, her veins manic as she'd clung to his chest, after she'd taken in the unfamilar new faces while she tried to paddle through the barrage in her head. _It's our baby girl,_ he'd whispered, his voice warming her ear, _she's not four years old anymore, but she's just as beautiful as we remember. You have no idea, Liv, no idea the world you've come back to._

And as she'd registered, made sense of the side-line, the skip-track of reality, she'd known somehow, that this was the place that light had gotten her, that faith that submerged in her blood the last day she saw him, that he'd finally given into before she'd stepped into the Wave-Sync.

Holding on to him there, on the cold floor of a lab she could hardly recognize anymore, she'd known somehow, no matter how incredible this circumstance, this was the ending-place where that light brought her.

This was where they'd lived out the changing tide, survived the turning season. This is the place they'd outlived their curse.

It'd been a congenial indulgence, she'd felt then, an all around reward of her faith that'd caused her smile, made her kiss him happily, excitedly, because all that hope in those rose-colored glasses gave them their daughter back, and brought them back to each other.

The where and how, and when simply didn't matter.

But she'd been so scared, so afraid then that Etta wouldn't know her, would turn her away because she'd had no memory of all those rasberries she blew on her tummy, or the tickles she'd attack her with after she'd slipped her into a fresh pair of jammies.

She'd looked into those eyes, those beautiful blue eyes so much like her father's, and prayed like hell, that she could hold her baby girl again and she'd let her.

And she'd had, miraculously, incredibly, she'd had, she'd remembered all those kisses, all those tickles, and the embrace had been heart-pulling, a feeling so wonderful she'd cried from the joy.

And then, again, there'd been blackness.

_You're gonna be okay,_ are the next words she remembers, Etta's voice to her, hours ago, as she'd slipped in and out of coherency, her body and mind weaving somewhere distant and then back, a ping-pong of her lucidity that made her want to shut her eyes, just close her eyes and rest,_ Mom, we're gonna get you somewhere safe, okay?_ she'd heard, felt her body being moved, smelled _him_, felt him under her hands, and then she didn't, and there'd been voices, urgent words around her, and the start of an engine, a hum of a car. _You just have to hold on, okay?_, her daughter pleaded, and she'd wanted to fight it, wanted to assure them all she was fine, but she couldn't swim through the exhaustion, coudn't find her strength enough to move, and in the end, it'd been the darkness again that consummed her, took her for itself one last time.

Then she'd woke here, blinked in on the bright light above her, a throbbing in her head, the nasal cannula that fed life to her sore lungs and an unfamilar attire, a V-neck T and baggy sweats she might have worn once, when she'd woke up in his clothes.

He'd been there, at her side, his head bowed, his hands a temple, folded over her tiny one with his lips pressed into her fingers, a permanant stamp of his protection, his night-watch and safeguard.

She knew then, that he hadn't left his post since she was brought to this place.

But it's her daughter, who'd responded first, Etta who'd realized she'd come to, and with a soft voice, a beautiful, tender smile from the other side of the chaise, she'd looked down on her mother, welcomed her back, and she'd felt her own mouth curve up, as she fought off the last traces of an intravenous grog, whatever liquid supplement she'd been given to help re-gain reality.

They'd told her everything then, after she'd asked, about how she'd gotten here, how he did, and with sad faces, they told her what the world is, the cest-pool of horror it's become when _They_ finally took entirely over.

There hadn't been time for anymore small talk though, no happy moments of a tender reunion, no talk of her condition, because Walter had come in next, followed by Astrid, and though they'd been a welcome sight, the latter hugging her, issuing her fully awake, too soon, her father-in-law began questioning her, pressing her for a recollection she couldn't give, an event she hadn't been given enough pain medicine to swallow down with enough ease.

That she'd appeared to him, a lifetime ago, reciting everything she'd found out mere minutes ago; because that's what it felt like, a still raw discovery.

There'd been some answer, as well, on the backside of the note she'd left him, but the reason for this was lost on her, too.

_Really, Walter?_ he'd questioned, from his spot at her side, _you couldn't have waited till she was out of here for this?_

_Information doesn't bare limitations, boy,_ he'd answered, _there's no boundry when collecting necessary fact. I am, afterall, trying to form a hypothesis._ He'd retorted then, told his father something about liking him better before, but all she could do was try to absorb what she'd been told, desperately attempting to latch on to anything they'd appreciate but there'd only been the imprint of the blackness, only the vapor that'd invaded her memory.

So she'd shook her head, grabbed it, apologized for knowing nothing, and then the Doctor came in, not in a lab coat or scrubs, but formal wear, and Etta had explained that she was a personal friend of Nina's, of the Division's, and that she'd been taken to a special center outside the wareshouse district, a medical facility where Civilians are left alone to treat each other._ We couldn't risk St. Jude's,_ she'd told her, as she'd squeezed her hand,_ there are no tabs being kept here, as far as they know, this is we were go to...well, it's just safer, for right now, that they don't know you're here. At least not until you're not who you are. Simon's working on getting you papers._

This she'd understood, could grapple with much less effort before the doctor issued them out, requested her guests take their leave so she could run more tests._ We'll be right outside, Mom,_ Etta told her, then her husband kissed her and her daughter hugged her, and it'd been the best feeling in every plane of existence.

It's almost too incredible, all of this; this new life in a world that's both heart-tugging and gut wrenching at the same time.

There's a hardship of the human standard here, one she'd begun to see long ago, but even so, it just can't equate to everything she's been re-given, everything their curse won't demand, anymore, they let go of.

For as terrible as it seems here, as ruthless as she's been told it is outside, all that hope she had then, all that beautiful light she'd felt, has manifested here, into her reunited family.

Her dam doesn't help now, as silent tears break through, and she lets them fall, presses her hand to her abdomen and feels the heat of her wedding ring sink through the cotton. When it does, she swears the light above her gets brighter, the monitors under it blinking for a second, then returning to normal.

He was right, all those years ago, he was right.

This child really is a super trooper.

It's when the door creaks open then, that her attention is grabbed, and she feels her smile break out when he comes in, somehow more beautiful even, then he's ever been before.

The look on his face is stunning, a broad grin she hasn't seen since their before days, since the Purge had been nothing more then a faraway possibility.

And wordlessly, he catches her gaze, holds it as he nears her, and like it always does, the grey-blue radiance leaves her heart thumping a little faster, makes her veins jump and hum at the same time.

This is the quiet, private moment they've both wanted since she got here.

He reaches out now, as he leans above her, caresses her cheek with the span above his knuckles, and it's when that radiance glosses over she realizes he's noticed her tears, that he understands they're not from pain but the same thing that's set his face in tenderness, an affection entrenched in softness every time he looks at her this way.

They're both completely overwhelmed here, now, to breathe each other again.

And the joy in this moment, the delicateness, has her running her fingers up his neck, over his jaw, the stubble a glorious memory under her fingertips and over her skin, and then it's his cheekbones and lips she trails over too.

_This is real,_ she's telling him, _we're actually here, and we're okay, and with everything I am, I love you._

In impatient response, he kisses her, a clash of his mouth with everything Peter, tastes of sweetness and danger, the honey-alcohol on the tip of his tongue, a promised land flavor that excites her flesh, ignites her nerve-ends and lifts her off the chaise with it's friction, it's thrill, and it makes her fist his shirt in her hands, a cotton against his sides that's burning with the heat of him.

And it's when she's pulling him down with her mouth that thrill starts getting intense, a wildfire that craves more then a kiss in a hospital room to satiate. Specific to her blood-cells, his desire too, is crashing into her, an electro-chemical lust that sighs into thier kiss, under her flesh, and when all of it is growing too strong, too hotly fierce, he pulls away, presses his forehead to hers as they fight for stolen air.

Then he laughs, a reverbeartion that sinks into her body too, and whether it's because of this re-kindled wonder or because they should know by now what inevitably happens when they embrace this way, she doesn't know.

And as he takes his seat in the room's only chair, she realizes the reason doesn't matter. Because either way, they're both here now, together.

One last time, he strokes her hair, plants a kiss on her lips, her chin, her neck, before he buries his face against her shoulder, inside her collarbone and through her shirt, she can feel the cool metal of his necklace on the right-side of her ribcage.

And it's after she runs a hand through his hair, the tussles a missed silk between her fingers, that she decides to make light of the power that still hangs in the air.

"Somebody missed me."

The words cut through the quiet, and his chuckle is relief, assurance, contentment, all a muffle against her body like his voice is when he responds.

"That's the understatement of two decades."

Her smile only gains width on this, her hand, a longer stroke, a comfort that tells him to let go, just let go of the past's disparity.

It's meaningless now.

For easy seconds, the room is silent then;

"What did the doctor say?"

He asks, his lips grazing her clavicle before he looks up at her, his facial flesh flushed from her body-heat, and it's his eyes that betray him, a slate-heather pleading of what he wants; that she give him the answer he's dying to hear.

If everything else so far was possible, then_ please God_, this could be too.

In answer, one of her hands finds her middle as the other grabs his, places it atop her not yet swollen belly. He doesn't need words because he already understands this, and there's a radiation of his gratitude, a joy that wipes the prior fear from his features, shines in twin sheens of wet-salt when he inhales a happy breath.

"That we're good," she finally tells him, all the while he's finding their hands and her abdomen immensely fascinating, "Everybody's fine. We're a perfectly healthy twelve weeks."

This makes him look at her, an air of a quip dripping from the edge of his mouth, a slow curl of his lip that makes her warm in knowing he's still, undoubedly, the man she married.

"And twenty-two years."

He says, satisfied with himself, and she raises a brow, feels her forehead wrinkle with the movement.

"Yeah, well, I don't think Dr. Ambre would have appreciated that headache."

They're both amused by this, allowing themselves a breath of easy air, then his hand, the one still on her belly, tangles in hers, plays with it.

And when his eyes catch her, they're serious again, overwhelmingly soul piercing.

"It's good to see you again, Olivia Bishop."

The words are soft, taking her back to years ago, to a different place in a different world when he'd thought, for the first time, that he'd lost her.

Bishop wasn't her last name then.

But she likes the sound of it so much better.

"It's good to see you, too."

The strength of his stare is so powerful, it's sucking the air from her lungs, the way it does when the force of his love for her, his worship, knocks her backwards and sideways, a tail-spin of everything she's made of that makes her ask, constantly, how in the hell she got so lucky.

Then it's something dejected that washes over his face, the shadow of a sadness he walked through this world with before her.

"I was so afraid, sweetheart," he says, the rare endearment tickling her ears, the sad set of his brow pricking at her empathy. "...that I'd never find you, that I wouldn't be able to."

It's the same despair she'd comforted, years ago, in a make-shift lab inside an abandoned warehouse, and just as before she won't let him give into it.

They'd broke their curse the minute he'd pulled her from that tank.

None of this pain is worth it anymore.

"Honey..." She smiles, soft, still feeling the warmth of those rose-colored lenses, "that's what faith is for."

"It should be," he says, simply, softly, "but faith is a tricky business."

He's almost ashamed to admit his fall, his shortcoming, but she only squeezes his hand tighter, wills him, like before, to accept what she's saying.

She can see in his eyes, deep down, that he feels it, too.

"Not for us."

She tells him, and that acceptance starts to surface, a gray-blue swim of that light that threatens to break into the open.

"In the end, it always brings us back here, to each other." she states, "I told you we weren't done yet, didn't I?"

It's a small smile he gifts her with, a timid oblige, a feel of what she's said that makes him shake his head, relinquish his thoughts, a release, finally, of all that past doubt, all his past fear.

"I won't let you know a life without me." she assures, feeling the strength of her conviction, the defeat of fate's cruelty burn through her. "I promise."

"That's good." he responds, taking her one hand in both his now, "Because I wouldn't be able to live through it. "

"Neither would I."

It's there, that light, illuminating every arch and plane of his face with more luminescence then the white snake above them.

Anything deep, any fragility in the air before now, is ushered away, gone with the emerging statement his cocky grin is preceding.

"I didn't think I'd ever like that goddamn tank."

He states, playfully, seriously, and again, she feels her brow crown.

"Wait till you see it from the inside."

She's enjoying the ease, the delightful redundancy.

"Only if it means you're getting half-naked."


	17. Part XVI

**(Part XVI) -2036-**

**{Peter}**

* * *

"Any chance you've worked out that hypothesis yet, Walter?"

The question hangs in the air, seems to fill their bereft surroundings with a sorely-missed life.

Marquette Center's main hall is hardly busy, its crowd a crash cart from his time, a rusty, broken water fountain and a line of chairs against the far wall, lined up like waiting soldiers; an infantry for the soon-to-be wounded.

Its lighting is bleak, as useful as its directory signs because the hectic place this once was is now a ghost-town, its only populous being them, two or three medical professionals, a loud man who slit his arm on the sharp shard of an import crate, and an empty vending machine; an antique from the before-world, left to corrode in its forgotten corner.

Outside his wife's room, he's rested his arm against the steel window pane, leaned his weight into it, watches from the observation point as his daughter eagerly talks up her mother, sharing stories and memories animated through familial likeness, equally radiant features recollecting and recounting, crying and laughing.

Ten minutes ago, he'd left them alone, decided to give them a privacy twenty-four years in the making.

It's a wonderful reality, all this, one that fills his heart up with a bliss he can't live without now, a joy that'd been a hole for too long in the center of his chest.

Behind this window, is the unification of his empire.

It's all so amazing, so impossibly incredible, and truth be told, he has no idea what the hell sense to make of it. The candy bar, his note, her re-appearance. There just wasn't anything he could think of to glue them all together, no cohesive explanation as to the why or the how.

And he was pretty damn experienced by now, in the fundamentals of pie-in-the sky things.

"Because I got to be honest," he continues, as his father shifts beside him. "I can't make heads or tails of any of this."

For a minute or two, his namesake is silent, the clocks in his head turning with the wheels of deliberation, the final form of a theory that seems to impregnate the air with its arrival.

"I believe, I can.'" his father says, finally, backing away slightly from the window, and when he looks over, his face is sternly set, a narrow, aged frown that harbors a conceived conclusion.

"Hansel and Gretel, you know the story, yes?"

"A fairy tale?"

He questions, confounded, and from her place behind them, Astrid steps forward, her arms crossed over his daughter's borrowed jacket, her brow knitted in curiosity; eager too, for a bite of the Mad Professor's deductive apple.

"Two tots who left behind bread crumbs to retrace their footfalls." his father begins to explain, his voice deep, overtly serious. "Essentially, constructing their own path and directing for themselves, a way back home. It's this concept, I believe, which we perpetrated, a goal accomplished through the inter-dimensional means we've experienced thus far."

Like he, the woman beside him frowns, unsure exactly, how the Brothers Grimm can allude to anything at all.

"It's my theory," his father continues, "that at some point in this future, be it days from now, weeks, months maybe, something proportionately epic occurs, a cataclysmic event more terrible even that what's already upon us. It's in that moment, we realize our only choice is to go back, to do it all again from the beginning, to react preemptively. A plan not to unlike our original decision twenty four years ago."

His father looks at him, then Astrid, before he illustrates his next words with his hands.

"It's my belief, that everything up till now has been dictated through particular events mapped out by us, designed circumstances we'd created by sending Olivia back through time in order to point us forward into the right direction; a jotted line that leads to the imperative X."

This makes him blow out an astounded breath, dry wash his face as slowly, he entertains the idea.

"And just when I thought I'd heard it all..." he remarks, indolent, before his father steps closer.

"Think about it Peter, " he says, his voice steel, "why else would she have come to me then, on that day, in the lab? How else would she have known the numerical sequence the lock-pad required, or have had in her possession, a rune diagram years ahead of its conception? Had now been then, I assume we would have found the matrix among Belly's things. It's not mere coincidence either, that his box of collectibles contained a broken portal device."

"You think it's the one she used when she came to see you?" Astrid questions before he can, her brows high, sculpted curves gaining height with her words. "The one she'd said she'd confiscated in order to travel back in time?"

"I do." his father reports, with a confident nod of his head, and when his index finds the space above his top lip and his thumb, his chin, he stares, in-objectively, through the window again. "Obviously we'd have found a way to fix it by then."

There's a _what-the-fuck?_ scenario now, running a muck in his head, a dumbfound of his right brain that bleeds into his left, and the blind-sidedness is a shock that emits his blank stare.

Until he remembers, again, that these kind of extravagant notions aren't supposed to surprise him.

It'd be a headache if he wasn't steering himself through it, veering into the place where this theory and its logic makes sense.

"Let me get this straight," he says finally, rubbing the flummoxed line from his forehead, "your saying, we've somehow lived out this future already? That some mass catastrophe happens...a shit-storm to end all shit-storms, and to prevent it from what?" he frowns, reaching, "...wiping out what's left of humanity...we planned to take the easy way out and ultimately, decided to re-direct our past to create a different outcome? A re-direction, which in the end, led us to the exact spot we're standing in right now?"

In answer his father's stoic, a patient statue while the feeble minded grasp, ponder.

Really, none of this should even impact him anymore. In a perfect world, it wouldn't because the impossible became rational way too long ago, but there's something to be said for cautious acceptance.

It comes faster.

"Walter this is-"

He can't finish the thought because the look on his father's face is so severe, so especially poignant, he doesn't want to edge on the disapproving stare. Obviously, he doesn't appreciate the skeptical undertone of his son's words.

So his breath is resigned, as he applies the concept, grants earnest life to this inclusive theory.

"Fine." he says, swallowing it down while he ticks off points, lays it out in his head,"Assuming even that you're right, that would imply that the breadcrumbs that got us here, that led us to this outcome -Olivia's teleportation, the amber event, the note- would all have to be constructed by the us standing here to begin with, none of those breadcrumbs would exist if we didn't get access to what was inside that vault. And we were able to do so, we were able to be here to find Bell's things, because Olivia showed up to you in the first place; using the portal device and carrying that hockey puck of a contraption."

"But we never found it here," Astrid points out, only adding now, to what's honestly becoming the most severe headache he's ever had. "How can-"

"Of course we didn't find it here." his father spits, his brows knitted above the stern folds that just crinkled his nose; creases of frustration, an almost angry irritation. "How could we? I told you, we'd already obtained it. It's an impossible conjecture then that we'd find it now, isn't it? It's a self-assuming elemental equation. If you'd deduce the logic properly, you'd understand this."

Slowly now, there's a turn of his reasoning, a languid curve of his thought process that's burrowing through the complexities of all this, letting him grasp what his father's considered apparent, obvious.

"Then, in theory, all this would mean we had no choice but to lead ourselves back to the same place we came from." Too tightly, he feels his frown carving out. "Walter, why would we-"

"Because the beginning was always the same." his father interrupts, knowing already the question on the tip of his tongue.

This confounds him, adds a new notion to compartmentalize, squeeze into another space of his deduction.

"What do you mean?"

"It's her, Peter, Olivia." his father's focus narrows a little more, as he views the mentioned through the lined glass. "For endless variations of reasons, for different and alternate objectives perhaps, in every version of the past, every iteration, she'd always gotten into the machine."

For a second, it's as though his mind strays, a silence that befalls him and then;

"And it's always here, to this year, where the other door leads, here where the other side of the machine decided to spit her out every time.

"The difference now, is that we'd found her, saved her through our own implemented compass. Effectually, making this derivation of our past the only one in which we succeeded in doing so."

Quickly, impressively, the realization dawns on him, falls into place with an almost undebatable validity, and he has to brace himself against the window again, gripping the bottom pane with both hands as he takes in the sight behind it.

"Because she died," he'd said, watching as his wife reaches out her hand, strokes their daughter's hair, "In every other version of this past, Olivia was never able to recount her experience in the machine because she never survived it . She never warned you, which means we were never Ambered. Before now, we weren't here in this future, so she was never found."

The thought's oppressing, debilitating, and he feels his lungs descend from it, a weight of _what-could-have-been_s that's too painful to bear.

"In every other past, she never made it out of that tank."

He concludes, his voice hoarse as he feels his forearms tighten, a support to his suddenly infirmed posture.

"Yes," he hears his father affirm, "and it's why this future is the only one in which we could have left our own breadcrumbs, the only one in which Olivia could have traveled back from."

His father turns, so does he, and when he meets his eyes, the older man's are a desensitized set of dark green, a solemn and stony contrast to what ardency they would have had once.

"Don't you see, son, it's a cylindrical paradox. For us to have saved Olivia in this future, we'd have already had to have done it. For her to have a conscious recollection of what she saw in the machine, she'd need to survive the experience initially. It's only after, that she can go back in time and warn me of Bell's conspiracy." His breath is long, privately introspective. "And there's no telling what would have become of us then, had we not been Ambered, had Bell succeeded in carrying out his initial scheme. "

It's now that those eyes narrow, the invisible wheels behind them turning into a different pathway before they arrive at the end of it.

"Though, I'd interject now, that it's not only possible, but likely the cataclysm that occurred was the eventual execution of that action. In the original future, we would have been oblivious to his motive."

Holy Fuck, there's just no end to the depth of this.

"Okay, Walter, just-." he's rubbing that line again, but it's in vain, "just-hold on a second. You're saying now, that the road-block we're hit with in this future, the Armageddon you spoke of before, is actually a horror that would have happened twenty something years ago in actuality? Which in reality, actually isn't actuality because it never really happened."

"It happened Peter," his father remarks, before his tone gets significantly more coarse, "but not to this us, not to the us, here. Perhaps if you opened your ears, you'd have the ability to aptly hear what I'm saying."

He's trying hard not to be offended by this, to not curse, again, Walter's shiny new brain cells and their resulting personality shift.

"If it were this future in which the cataclysm occurs," his father explains, aggravation apparent, "then there would be no logical point to this theory would there? It's because of our own interference that we've prevented ourselves from having to experience the catastrophe over again. In this progression of events, as we currently live them out, we've steered ourselves away from that fate."

From beside him, Astrid's frown deepens before she directs it at his father.

"I don't understand," she states. " I thought you said that it's because of the cataclysm that we sent Olivia back in time. If that never happens here, then why-"

"Good god," Walter interrupts, that aggravation finally exasperating his words as he fists a hand and throws another in the air. "Am I the only one who understands this? By definition, a paradox is a derivative argument, it has no choice but to contradict itself. Even bricks could grasp such an elementary concept."

A knee jerk reaction has him tensing from his father's attitude, a response of his muscles as he bites his tongue, feels his neck start to warm with his own irritation. So to calm his upset nerves, he covers his mouth, drags his hand down his chin until he reaches four in his frustration's silent countdown.

He doesn't want to argue Walter's new hostility again, so he settles on civility. The question that's running circles in his head, floating around with its inexplicability, is too eager for an answer now anyway.

"At the risk of you jumping down my throat.." he says finally, dropping his arm. "And since, apparently, I don't have the sense of paving blocks to know this...how is it Bell's plan in twenty-fifteen could have taken place in twenty-thirty six? The year we presumably sent Olivia back from? The year when all this started? How is it two different years, two decades apart, can play out at the same time, in the same place? The last I checked there wasn't a sandbox for that."

It only takes a minute this time, for his father to forget his frantic episode; the question's new intrigue rebounding his temperament, and it'd be a comfort, a recognizable and familiar character trait, if not for the austerity that still lives in his stare.

"Don't be so convinced son," he responds, his callousness replaced with a matter-of-fact cadence, "we already know that machine has capabilities beyond what we can adequately ascertain. That it could integrate time into itself isn't so unreasonable to believe. In this instance, and for this purpose, I expect it effectively weakened the cohesion of space-time, fundamentally restructuring its pliability to allow multiple realties to unfold simultaneously, each one inside of the other as opposed to the adjacently cutaneous manner we've witnessed before."

That stare turns back to the window, not to the young woman who's now curled into her mother's side, but to the private contemplation that resides in its nothingness.

"What's happened here is an amalgamation of three separate futures." he continues to explain. "Three events from three different times all unraveling, all overlapping to co-exist inside an existential causality loop. A loop that essentially directed us to where we'd need to be; to here, now, in this year, to the time and place where we can acquire the infallible means to defeat our Enemy. It's why it's inevitably here, where the machine always pushed Olivia out."

Again, he's bracing himself on the steel ledge but it's not a narrow support anymore, just a projecting edge that reminds him this is how his reality works; fucking natural physics sideways until, in every way that it can, it defeats the notion all together.

And now he just needs to grasp, whole-heartedly, the astronomical complex of this.

"Wait so, three events happened?"

From her place at his side, Astrid's voice is a fluctuating pitch,a thought said out-loud, a struggling understanding laced in a question, and from whom it was directed, the only answer is a simple and stern "yes".

There's no following elaboration, no explanation set out for, so he turns to them, notices Walter's attention is still a fierce passiveness inside the smudge-marked glass, and when he looks at his father's only other student, her lost expression is almost apologetic.

Even after a week, she's still trepidatious about testing the waters of this new Dr. Bishop, and she's sorry now that she can't make the kind of intellectual leaps as them both, afraid that asking one wrong thing could peak a fragile patience. Again. So it's for her relief, that he'll handle this, take the risk of the backlash with a tongue-in-cheek tone, his words a ready defense against his father's unpredictable mood.

And the tiny smile she'll give him after lets him know that she's grateful.

"Care to elaborate on that Walter, for the sake of the stupid class?," he asks, referencing their accusatory status.

"Isn't it obvious, Peter?" No mood, just an unwavering concentration. "Olivia's conveyance and resulting rescue, our integral assimilation into this world, and the successful evasion of our grave fate twenty-four years ago. Each one, a coincidental occurrence inside the same spacial sphere. Assigning them numerical consequence is inherently impossible."

"So basically it's like a movie with three different stories?" Astrid remarks, finally straight running into that leap, "One's that you find work each other out in the end?"

Now his father looks at them both, first him, then Astrid, and when he does, his eyes are slightly less flinty, an aged-gray hint deep inside them of an old appreciation.

"A rather circumscribed analogy, but conceptually speaking, yes, that's the idea. Perhaps there's hope for one of you yet."

It's on the last sentence, his father's attention is drawn back to him, the implication quite clear, and he's deciding whether to roll his eyes or be irritated.

Neither's worth the effort at this point, so he shakes it off instead, turns his focus back to the window, watches as his wife presses her cheek into thier daughter's hair, brushes her hand down her arm and up again; a bedtime routine from her smaller days, better days.

"I admit, I've been trying to infer why, why this time and not one prior, did the circle initiate." he hears his father, his voice inside that personal place again, "And my only probable conclusion, is that it was her, Olivia. Specifically, the state of her mindset when she'd stepped into the machine."

This new curiosity snaps his notice into high gear, puts it back on Walter with a tight new frown etching into his forehead.

"It's possible, that in every other iteration," he begins, "though she'd carried out the objective, she'd been hesitant, unwilling even. But here, in this past, our past, it was her will, her inclination to overcome failure that allowed her to subconsciously manipulate the Wave-sync while inside of it, re-molded its directive to consent to her desire. In effect, making it complaisant to her desiderated ambitions without any consciously direct thought control.

"This causality loop was the Machines way of not only insuring her survival, but granting us the answer in how to defeat the Observers. Both outcomes, I'd safely assume, are what she'd hoped for then."

Vexation's headache has simply become a dull rapt behind his eyes, a pain traded for the implacable logic that's squeezing his skull, the hard hands of the inarguable sense all this has sunk into his left brain.

"You know Peter, your mother believed that some truths are eternally devoid of irrefutable proof." his father says, "Given that we'll never be able to positively substantiate this theory, I suppose in the end, credence can be granted that argument here. Perhaps, it's meant to."

As intended, the words have an air of finality, and they make him press his forehead into the window, the cool glass flushing his skin, soothing away the phantom trace of incoherent explanation.

And as he copes, his father takes his leave, a quiet pardon of an exhausted mind, and soon after, Astrid takes his place, a step into the spot beside him as she too, takes it all in.

There really is no point, when it all quits getting weirder.


	18. Part XVII

**(Part XVII) -2036-**

**{Peter}**

* * *

"Jesus," is all he can say now, as they stand, unyielding before the window, and the breath he blows out condenses itself on the glass's surface. "I can't say this is the simplest thing to wrap my head around," he confesses to her, "but I can't deny that it all makes a strangely astounding amount of sense."

He looks over at her and his grin is short; a shoulder-shrug of his mouth.

"In the way we're use to, anyway."

Conceding, Astrid nods her head, her brown eyes meeting his in the sympathy shared by journeying companions, a concurrence of understanding in a world where nothing use to be sound but solid ground.

Then again, it would fit into the thick of things, if somehow that got anatomically vaporized now, too.

And it's when he focuses through the pane again, that an earlier curiosity re-surfaces, the small figment of his psyche's struggle pushed aside for heavier thoughts.

"How did she know I'd figure it out?" he asks, more to nothing then the woman beside him, but still, he can feel her frown so he explains. "If I never made the connection with that note, then we'd never have gotten into that lab again."

For minutes she's silent, searching for the kind of answer that's eighteen million degrees less complicated then one his father would give, and when she does finally speak, her voice is soft but with conviction.

"Maybe for the same reason she went into that machine in the first place." In question, he turns back to her, and when she smiles, it's with sentiment, with pride, "She had faith."

That pride stretches, spans itself into high, mocha colored cheek bones.

On top of it, there's a new glint in her eyes, a burnt umber of reflection, a note hinged in both their pasts when she was the biggest cheerleader in the corner of his blooming relationship. For so many years she's been their greatest friend, their truest confidante, and as he did days before on the train, he feels a genuine flutter of warmth reverberate through his chest.

They'll never share so much memory, feel so much familial connection toward anyone else.

"She believed in you, Peter," she reiterates, "And again, you proved her right. That kind of trust is just another reason why she married you."

"Just another reason?"

He questions her, needing the lightness, knowing full well a few of those memories consist of nights given over to girl-time, late night hours of their later years when he would stay up with his daughter because Astrid stole mommy away and took her to the city, an estrogen break from the fun-house of Bishop craziness.

In response, she throws her hands in the air, presses her lips tight before her secret smirk appears.

"I swore to secrecy." she tells him, and as he'd expected, she won't share anymore morsels from the kind of conversations married women have with their girlfriends. Regardless, he uses it to the advantage of his second X chromosome.

"If you're implying what I think you're implying," he says, "I'm not ashamed to say it's true."

She shakes her head, rolls her eyes, and when she looks at him under full lashes, there's a tiny line at the corner of her smile.

Despite how smoothly she'll evade, it gives away the truth.

"Isn't that what all men say?"

"I'm allowed. I mean it."

This uproots her posture and makes her laugh, and when she shakes her head, it's in amusement this time.

"She's right." she comments, obviously referring to one of those girly talks. "You are hopeless."

His grin matches hers and the air is easy, unaffected even by the far-off curse of someone in pain, someone's cut burning as doctor's hands are cleaning it out.

And suddenly, as that umber shines, he feels a little selfish, a little ashamed that he's been so caught up in his own integration here that he hasn't asked her how she's adjusting to everything new, everything strange, how she's handingly her own loss and especially, the characteristics of his father's new upgrade.

Speaking of the devil, she reports she's going to go find his father, make sure this one's not making any enemies because his short trigger fuse is more tempermental, less crazily addled and not as easily brushed off as mentally unsound as before. She liked it better when everyone just thought he was insane, not a brilliant-minded curmudgeon with a tendency toward insult.

And as she turns to walk away, she crosses her arms across her chest, perparing herself, and so badly he wants to tell her that he's sorry, sorry the old man she's mother henned for years isn't nearly so corrigable anymore.

Honestly, he misses his old dad, too.

"Hey Astrid," the words stall her, turn her around to face him again, and as that dim light shadows down on her in white-yellow, he lifts a shoulder, drops it, "About Walter-"

"It's okay," she cuts him off, and the curve of her mouth is reassuring, confident, "I can deal. I grew up with a Mr. Miser for an uncle. I'm a pro at dealing with grumpy old guys."

It's for his sake she's said this, for the relief of another weight added onto his already heavy mind-plate. She knows everything he's been rail-roaded with, and to add on another worry, something else to concern himself with because of her, is unnecessary, not allowable. She's a big girl who refuses to add to his stress level.

He's one of the greatest friends she'll ever have, too.

_I know you care,_ her smile tells him,_ but let this one thing go, at least just this one thing. Let me help you ease your mind. Let me care about you, too._

"Thanks."

He responds, but whether it's for the smile, or her encouragement or her friendship, he can't quite peg-down. It wouldn't matter anyway because he's so damn grateful for all three.

And she knows it, absorbs it through the blush that's colored her features, a flatter from everything he's just said in one simple word.

"Get in there," is the only response she can muster, as she tilts her head toward the room, "I think you've spent enough time away from her, don't you?"

And all he can do is nod back.

This world may be fucked-up for so many reasons and, a brain-re-installation aside, all the people he loves, his whole family, is here with him, living in it.

As unbelivable as it sounds, this is hardly the last place he wants to be.


	19. Part XVIII: Conclusion

**(Part XVIII) -2036-**

**{Olivia}**

* * *

Before he even snuck back in here, she already felt him, a force-field of his gravity that pulled on her skin, an essence of the static that plays in her blood, seems heavier now, if at all possible, in this place, in this world.

Or maybe it's a bio-kenetic attribute, one twice as sensitizing now, passed on to the baby girl nestled in her side, the young woman who's breath is falling peacefully into the nook of her shoulder, whose joyful tears have dried now, along the line of her neck.

"The last time I saw you do that, she was only three feet tall."

The honey gravel of his voice warms her, a beautiful feel of his presence under the heavy weight of her lids, and through her closed eyes, she smiles, her fingers, brushing through their daughter's hair, silk strands weaving in and out of her digits in the whisper of a twenty-year old memory.

"All these years, and she's still so much like you."

She comments, and hears him shuffle, envisions him taking his seat on the vacant side of her...bed.

"If you're referring to her mouth, I was going to warn you."

As she's sure he'd intended, this amuses her, her whole body vibrating with quiet laughter.

"Actually I was talking about what side of the bed she favors."

She hears him chuckle now, soft, short, impressed again, in a rare moment when she proves he's rubbed off on her in more ways then one.

When their daughter came in, he'd excused himself, said he was going to talk to Walter before he'd kissed her, squeezed Etta's hand before giving her a tight hug.

For what seemed like hours they'd talked of nothing and everything, their little girl of her upbringing, of Nina's careful guidance, her hazy memories, preference for risky situation and effortless skill when it comes to snowing people over. In return, she spoke of things like Etta's first tooth, the first time she'd walked, said "_mama_" and "_grandpa_" and _"transubstantiation_", (daddy taught her that one during a case). They spoke of the things they had in common, of her grandfather, her partner, her job, the new sibling she'll have and the days she's already spent with her dad by her side.

It'd all felt so comfortable; a connection, a close knit bond never forgotten, merely lost, finding itself in easy camaraderie and silent affection, a fluid love that infused sanitary air.

_All the times I'd imagined what it'd be like,_ her daughter had said then, her big blue eyes misty,_ and none of them compares to how great it feels to have both of you back, to finally feel like I have a real home, to belong to my family again. I don't know that I've ever been this happy, Mom._

_Me either, baby,_ she'd responded, caressing the soft skin of her daughter's cheek, sopping up stray tears with the pad of her thumb, _you've always been so precious, Etta, I'm so proud of the woman you've become._

It's then when their daughter crawled into this chaise, let the overwhelm of everything sink in as she was lauled to sleep the way she use to be, when she'd be contented by nothing other then the feel of her mother's arms.

"She's everything I'd hoped she would be." she tells him now, her focus on their daughter, taking in her grown form, still small somehow, as her hand moves to caress her back.

"Perfect?"

He questions, his voice low, and she knows he's absorbing the beautiful sight, too.

"Yeah."

The room gets quiet, in the soft way it use to when the three of them and fluffy Rufus shared a queen bed, nothing existing but their perfect little family.

And she knows he's feeling it too, when his hand finds her abdomen, and when she looks at him, there's a gray-blue happiness hinged in another vying concentration, reality commingled in some new private introspection. She knows this look, recognizes the way the line between his brow etches deeper, an embedding of his compartmentalizing thoughts, so she reaches out now, strokes her fingers through much shorter, darker tussles.

It's longer then before, chestnut tufts falling over his temples, and when she brushes them away, she wonders for an instant, if their unborn child will get his unruly curl.

He's pulled back to the room with the touch, and when he smiles, it's radiant, reassuring. She can only guess why he left in the first place.

"What did Walter say?"

She asks him, and the breath he blows out tells her she was right, a mix of amazement and wrangled acceptance; an awe of belief.

"You sure you wanna know?"

In response, she entwines their hands again, their palms pressing together before their fingers hook.

"At this point, I think I can handle it."

So he tells her, speaks of things like warped time, conjoined realities, The Machine, and her determinate will, and when he's finished, when the last, unbelievably fantastic thing leaves his mouth, her only reaction is to grab her head, the new news spinning her headache again as she digests the possible impossibilities.

"Wow," she says, quiet, and for a moment she's silent, her body overcome with the numb of realization, and when she presses her lips together, it's to properly ascertain the knowledge with the effort it requires.

It makes her think, again, that impossible is a coward's way out, the firefight they consistantly surmount, a code they continually re-write, and re-define until nothing is insuperable anymore.

But of course, an easy conqour isn't a luxury their tour de force ever grants them.

"We can't ever escape the most complicated way out of things, can we?"

She comments, and when he shakes his head, it's with an illustrating grin.

"What fun would that be?" he replies, his features colored in sarcasm, "Though, in this case, I'd say complicated just got a few degrees more complicated."

And it's while she absorbs, too, the one hundred and eighty different levels of the theory's complexity, that he thinks of something else.

"And we still kicked its ass."

She laughs at this, understands that he too, knows the curse they keep out-living, the burden on their shoulders they keep defying because they won't give up. They don't give in.

They're not Atlas and they're not Icarus. They don't surrcome to their fate.

That's not their life.

The air takes on a different quality now, as his eyes change, a delicate blue, pale almost under the reaching white-arm and the light shades the angles of his face in a seeminlgy softer flouresence.

"I'd say what's next," he tells her, "but, I guess we already know."

"Well, whatever we face now going forward," she responds, "we're together again, we're a family, and somehow that makes all the circumstances of this world seem a little less frightening."

His mouth stretches, a tiny curve of something pleasant, a pull of the beautiful place where she promised, so long ago now, to live in forever. A show of the same peace, the same tranquility she has knowing their love is whole again.

"I'm not scared of what's to come, Peter." she confidently states, "We've defied so much already to have made it this far, and there's no reason to believe that we won't still."

She squeezes his hand tighter.

"No matter how hard it could be, we'll get by," she says, suddenly feeling heat behind her eyes, "we'll figure it out. Because that's what we do. We survive. And we live."

The smile he's giving her is beautiful, matching the look in that pale-blue, the concord of his soul that's sighing into her own.

And when he reaches out, strokes the side of her face, it deepens, a complete suffocation of everything she is at the feet of his affection, his love, and if it filled her chest anymore, she fears she'd explode from the heat of it.

"That's what having faith gives us."

It's a simple statement, a pleasantly stern re-iteration of what she'd said earlier, and it only makes her ten times more glad that she'd taken his last name, that she'd said _"yes"_ when he'd asked her to marry him because there's no one else in the world who's nearly so perfect, so absolutely stunning with permeating inner beauty.

_All these twist and turns of our fate,_ he'd said to her, years ago, before sticky fingerprints glittered every wall of their home, _they're nothing compared to this._ And in the quiet of her bedroom, as they laid bare, his sweat drying on the edge of her skin, he'd pressed his nose to her cheek, left the fainest butterfly kiss there as he whispered in her ear._ This is the greatest thing about us, Liv, that we're still here together, after everything we've been through, we're still here._

_And for the rest of my life, I'll only ever want you. I'll only ever love you._

There's no one else who could ever take so much of her.

"I love you." she tells him now, leaning into his palm, and it steals her breath away, again, the way his eyes hold a hundred and one emotions, a shine of everything he feels for her caught in deep gray, darkened now, by way he's looking at her under his lashes.

_Forever, I'll want you._

"I believe it."

He responds, and when he kisses her, she tastes his happiness, his lust on the tip of his tongue, and again, her skin is brimming with his electricity, a hot spark of the magnetic profusion that lives now, deep in her viens, and before it grows urgent, before this cell-numbing chemistry calls out for more, he pulls back, as crazed and dizzied as she.

"We really gotta stop doing this in public places."

And quietly, she laughs, and when she does the light above them flickers for only a second, buzzes brighter just like the vitals machine, and to follow, as if in silent response, her daughter sighs, burrows her head a little deeper into the side of her body. And the bullet dangling off his neck, it moves too, sways a little in the air before it settles down again.

And the look he's giving her now is priceless, a light blue sparkle of realization, awe and second-hand amusement under a raised brow, and when he smiles, the high arch crimps those beautiful eye lines.

Then his hand finds her middle, the heat of his band melting through her T-shirt as he absorbs again the miracle they've created together.

"This kid definitely takes after you."

And for the umpteenth time in their life together, she couldn't be more happy that this beautiful man she loves so relentlessly wears fatherhood so effortlessly, so amazingly, that it takes her breath away.

There's no one else she'd give so much to. Forever, she'll want him, too.

And because she can't help it, because she's so godamn thrilled with the way it feels, she pulls him into her mouth again.

This is their salvation, the only way they'll survive.

Together, in love as a family, they'll make it by, because they're meant for more then failure, and they always will be.

Again and again, she'll make sure of it.

They'll know no other fate, now.

They're not meant to.


End file.
